Russian Blog

American WW2 poster

2007-03-19T19:19:00.000+03:00

No comment

2007-02-26T18:41:00.000+03:00

On Economic Freedom

2007-02-06T18:28:00.000+03:00

Andy from Siberian Light posted some very interesting statistics from Index of Economic Freedom 2007 compiled by Heritage Foundation. According to the index Russia is #120 among 157 rated countries while other post-Soviet countries are mostly doing much better. For example, Kazakhstan is #75 and Georgia is #35.

Andy is at a loss
I’ve been racking my brains to think of something positive to say about this for Russia, and about the only thing I can think of is: if Russia has the world’s 10th largest economy, but is this unfree… imagine what it could do if it took deregulation seriously.

I decided to dig a bit deeper into the index because I know well how the economy of Kazakhstan works and I don’t find any serious differences between Kazakhstan and Russia. I did find many curious details.

First, the overall country index is based on a weighted score of such factors as business freedom, fiscal freedom, property rights, freedom from corruption, etc. The freest country in the world Hong Kong has the score of 89,3. At the bottom of the list are Cuba (29,7) and North Korea (3). Russia’s score is 54 and Kazakhstan’s score is 60,4. The difference of 6,4 points brings Russia 45 places down. If Russia could improve its score from 54 to 64 it could be as free as Jordan and South Africa (67 countries in between). At the same time at the top of the list things look different. Hong Kong score of 89 minus 10 brings us to Luxembourg (6 countries in between). Luxembourg score minus ten brings us to Czech Republic (69,7 and 23 countries in between). As we see for “mostly unfree” and “repressed” countries every point counts but for free countries plus-minus 10 points don't really matter.

Second, let us look at detailed ratings of Kazakhstan and Russia. There are two approaches: some ratings are calculated technically: inflation, taxes, taxed to GDP, etc. This is a very nice approach – no bias only digits. But then some rating are purely subjective and sometimes subjective beyond comprehension. Technical scores of Russia and Kazakhstan are very similar. There are only two differences. The first difference: in financial freedom Kazakhstan gets 60 but Russia 40. Why? I agree that Kazakhstan has better banking regulations, fewer banks and the sector is less dominated by state-owned banks (it is dominated by private banks run by Nazarbayev’s close relatives). But does it make 20 points difference? The second difference in ratings: Kazakhstan labor freedom rating is 80,5 but Russia gets only 66,2. This means that in Kazakhstan labor has less guarantees from employers, minimal wage is tiny, working hours are not limited, unwanted workers could be fired without much ado. Russia cares more about employees rights and less about employers. Conclusion – Russian economy is less free. Don’t you find this labor freedom index a bit tricky? For example, the shining example of labor freedom is Georgia – it’s 99,9 (one of the main reasons Georgia is #35). I can confirm it – in Georgia employees are treated like cattle.

Third, even technical scores could be adjusted subjectively. There is a freedom from corruption score. It's subjective but separate from technical ratings. Good. But the guys from Heritage Foundation act differently. There’s corruption rating, then (in case with Russia) they say that from the point of legal demands the courts are totally independent but judges are corrupt and we bring the score down. Property rights judicially are ok but officials are corrupt. What’s the problem? Either get rid of a separate corruption rating or stop introducing this “Russia is corrupt” bias into every technical ratings.

Comparing ratings of rich countries and the rest of the world is hilarious. Take labor freedom rating in France and Russia. French labor code is Draconian – to fire a lazy worker is almost impossible. France labor rating is 65,9 and Russia has 66,2.

Heritage Foundation has a lot of problems trying in vain to prove that economic freedom brings prosperity, growth and a lot of investments. Unfortunately the correlation is so weak that special methods are introduced into methodology to make statistics more “supportive” for ideological dogmas.

PS. By the way, Andy. Before exclaiming "Russia's economy is less free than Communist China's" look at the rating Russia and China both have 54,0 score. Why China is #119 but Russia #120? Can you guess?

Sagacious Economist

2007-01-18T17:52:00.000+03:00

It is widely believed that the Economist is a serious and respectable magazine but somehow its analysis of Russia is simply miserable. Only a couple of years ago Economist stopped making doomsday forecasts for Russian economy. It embarrassed itself too many times.

Kirill Pankratov found this wonderful masterpiece in Economist’s “The World in 1999” where its renowned analysts made economic forecasts almost for every country on this planet.

1999 will be the year of Russia's disintegration… Trade between Russia's regions will plunge at least until they hit on a stable, trusted currency in which to do business. That is hardly likely to be the rouble, and the planned coupons and currencies which some regions have been planning look equally unattractive substitutes. How much would a Urals franc be worth in Rostov-on-Don, or a Saratov mark in Perm? ...foreign invasion, albeit of a peaceful and benevolent kind, is exactly what Russia's regions should want… The probable decline in Russia's wealth in 1999 will be around 10%… expect yet another bleak and miserable year.

Fedia Kryukov's New Blog

2007-01-15T18:50:00.000+03:00

When I grew completely sick and tired of writing on the topic “Western media lies about Russia” Fedia Kryukov took the baton from me and started his own blog “Russia in the media”.Here’s an extract from his post “The “Empire of Lies” Strikes Back”:

Our fearless exposer of lies and liars, Alexandra Poolos, further maintains that if you "ask any seemingly cosmopolitan Russians on a downtown Moscow street about their take on the international scandal, [...] they will most likely shrug and suggest that the former spy Alexander Litvinenko poisoned himself just to make Russian President Vladimir Putin look bad." Well, from this I can only assume that Alexandra Poolos never actually bothered to "ask any seemingly cosmopolitan Russians" anything of that nature. Because the polling agencies, those who actually ask such questions as part of their job, came up with somewhat different results. For example, the independent Levada Center conducted a poll between December 8-12 and found that 20% of Russians believe Litvinenko was killed by his former business partners, 15% -- by Boris Berezovsky, 10% -- by Russian special services, 8% -- by western special services, 8% -- he accidentally got poisoned while smuggling radioactive materials, 1% believe it was a suicide. The same poll also asked why Litvinenko was killed. Only 19% of Russians believe it was done to make Russia (14%) or Putin (5%) look bad. Other theories included revenge for something Litvinenko did (15%), due to dangerous information he possessed (14%), in order to create a political emergency in Russia to enable Putin to run for the third term (4%). Thus, Alexandra Poolos's alleged "most likely" replies are possible only from the 9% of respondents who believe Litvinenko killed himself, and the 19% of respondents who believe it was done to damage Russia or Putin. And these two sets don't even necessarily intersect, which would make the number of people who espouse the "most likely" view rather tiny.
Read more…

Great job, Fedia!

Now and then

2006-12-27T18:15:00.001+03:00

I haven’t been in the UK since 1990. A lot of things changed and changed almost completely. The UK was always a multi-cultural country but sixteen ago British culture was a part of this “multi”. How ironic! British women spent hundred of years fighting for equality but today they see hundreds of creatures completely clad in black sacks who are treated as house animals by their husbands.

What is even more striking – everyone I know realizes how many problems the “multi-culture” brings but don’t say it aloud. That’s not PC. It reminds me of the Soviet times when everyone understood total imbecility of Soviet propaganda but could discuss it only among friends at kitchen tables. The kitchen table discussions are back in the UK. Is there any political party in the UK that actually voices evident concerns are “multi-culturalism”? There are more and more people on British soil that sincerely hate British culture and British life-styles. What would it lead to?

Some other observations. British kids became very unruly. Women started drinking like men. Much more litter on the streets. Hobos have much fewer teeth.

The Right Way

2006-12-25T19:43:00.000+03:00

On the arrow, "The Right Way"
Bear, "I'd better go my own way"

Where is America's Politkovskaya? Part 2.

2006-11-10T18:12:00.000+03:00

This is my answer to Mark Ames question.

Any war dehumanizes people. No matter what were the reasons for war the moment people start killing each other humaneness is lost and sooner or later only the need to survive remains. But fighting nations need soldiers who beyond survival can also behave “heroically”. How can you force a sane person into killing more enthusiastically? He must hate the enemy. He must hate not an abstract enemy but any concrete enemy soldier who looks exactly like you and me. One needs some magic to transform an ordinary person into beast, insect, disgusting piece of dirt, sadist and not actually a human being at all. This task at war is performed by war journalists.

War journalists should satisfy a number of hard demands, like
- The should be brave and courageous. This is a real war after all.
- They should be sincere and truly believe in what they write even when they fantasize.
- They should be able to find some real facts about enemy’s crimes to sound credible.
- They should be able to write beautiful fiction and to add chilling details to the facts they find. Who at war is really interested that two children were killed by a hellicopter missle? A real war correspondent should decribe in great details how the pilot was intentionally hunting the poor kids, how tears of the helpless babies were streaming down their faces, how the pilot was laughing demonically when pushing the button and how horrible their mutilated bodies looked. Some call it death porn but for a war correspondent it’s job – nobody says wars are pretty.
- In case there are no facts at hand war correspondents should always be able to find credible witnesses and make interviews with them.

That's exactly what Anna Politkovskaya was – a war journalist fighting on the side of Chechen rebels. And she did her job fine. I believe her books and articles helped dozens of Chechen men and women to become guirillas and suicide bombers. During proper wars like WW2 nations don’t have war correspondents writing “truth” about their soldiers but in case an army is fighting guerillas like in Chechnya or Iraq things are different. First, such wars are mostly distant and don’t disturb everyday activities of ordinary citizens. Second, we live in a very politically correct world where big transnational NGO’s keep a close eye on human rights and power abuses. This way it’s normal that there’re many Politkovskayas both in Russia and in America. Only people both in Russia or America have very little interest to read books where their sons are described as sadistic orcs from Mordor. Enemy war correspondents are almost always marginal figures to the general public in there native countries but are extremely popular in countries that support their enemies. This is why Politkovskaya was so popular in the West and Gore Vidal is so loved in Iran.

Things would be very different if the war with Iraq would’ve been real. Imagine – Iraqi tanks at the gates of Chicago, half of the country lies in ruins, office workers of yesterday are toiling at production lines. What kind of reaction newspaper stories about American soldiers raping helpless Iraqis would provoke?

Taken, for example, into the context of WW2 Politkovskaya’s best stories would sound outrageous. Imagine a Christmas 1944 Time issue with an article by Ann Politkoff. Young American intelligence officers arrest two poor German farmers Hans and Fritz, put them into a pit with water where they lie naked in their own excements when the temperature is at ice point. From time to time American officers rape them saying, “We do so because your German women don’t want to sleep with us”. At last Hans and Fritz are set free. They find Ann and tell her the story but she has to keep them anonymous as well as the place where they were tortured – evil Americans would certainly hunt them down and kill. “Now the only thing I want is revenge, - says Fritz – That’s why everyone in American uniform is a legitimate target for me.”

The story sounds absolutely absurd. How long can a person survive in a pit with freezing water? Did young intelligence offices washed the poor guys from excrements before raping them? How comes they don’t rape German women who don’t want to sleep with them? Why at last didn’t they kill them? On the other hand if this story would've been published in Voelkischer Beobachter Germans in 1944 would’ve found it totally credible – everybody knows Americans are irrational sadists and perverts.

Sticking it up Vladimir the Impaler

2006-11-02T16:19:00.000+03:00

This is an article by N.Petro published at Asian Times Online.

Sticking it up Vladimir the Impaler
By Nicolai N Petro

Among Russian President Vladimir Putin's many sins, surely the most outrageous is that he dares to compare Russia to the West. He has clearly forgotten Russia's proper role in our Narrative of Western Civilization: to serve as a poignant example of all the sins that we never commit. Putin has the temerity to suggest that Russia and the West face similar problems, and the gall to think that the West could even learn a thing or two from Russia.

Quite understandably the US media have responded to such insolence with a collective "ecrasez l'infame!" After the Group of Eight summit on July 19, the venerable Times of London politely told Putin that we Westerners didn't appreciate his wisecracks about the scandals surrounding Lord Levy (Prime Minister Tony Blair's chief fundraiser, dubbed "Lord Cashpoint") or democracy in Iraq. "A little more grace, and less hubris," if you please, wrote The Times.

Hear, hear! The last thing any of us needs is to hear about corruption, criminality, and violence in our own countries. Why, the next thing you know Putin will discover racism in some benighted corner of our enlightened lands and start quoting Samuel Johnson at Americans: "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?"

The Times editorial quite properly pointed out that, as host at the G8, it was quite ungracious of Putin to give voice to such piffle. As every civilized person knows, the mark of true gentility is to attack your guest at a private dinner in his honor, as the president of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, did at recent the EU-Russia summit in Lahti, Finland.

According the Italian daily La Stampa, Borrell introduced his guest by sarcastically remarking that "we should be thanking Putin for closing the pipelines to Ukraine last January, which has brought us here to talk about energy". From there he spoke movingly of his concern for human rights, non-governmental organizations and the free press (only in Russia, of course). "We buy oil from the worst countries," he added sadly, "but we don't ask them to share our values."

What subtlety! What grace! What a coincidence that his remarks at an event closed to the press were leaked in time for the morning editions.

Putin, though, has still not learned to sit quietly and bow his head in shame. First, he slyly admitted that he too was concerned about crime, but then added that surely Russia wasn't the only country that had such problems. What about the recent criminal indictments of several Spanish mayors, and oh, by the way, "The mafia was not born in Russia."

One could have heard a fork drop on the fine linen tablecloth. The 25 European Union leaders who had gathered to gang up on the Russian president that evening could scarcely believe their ears. Once again Putin had violated one of the cardinal principles of our relations with Russia by comparing his problems to ours.

The danger in such behavior should be apparent to all. If Russia's problems are seen as in any sense comparable to our own, then it can no longer be excluded from Western institutions on the basis of its cultural incompatibility, and what else is really left?

Militarily, as everyone knows, Russia is but a shadow of the former Soviet Union. It poses so little threat that when Georgia seized four Russian military officers, the Russian parliament responded by speeding up the withdrawal of its remaining forces. Georgian Minister of Defense Irakli Okruashvili now regularly dares Russia to try to invade his country.

Economically Russia has done better, but its foreign investments overseas still put it on a par with Malaysia. As an energy provider, Russia supplies Europe with about a quarter of its natural gas, but this is two-thirds of Russia's gas exports, so that actually Russia is far more dependent on its European consumers than they are on it.

Putin's wily retorts pose a real and present danger to the West, however, precisely because they erode the sharp distinction between Western and Russian identity, between Western and Russian values, that are needed to safeguard Western Unity.

If this distinction disappears, pray tell, how will we be able to sustain our fear of Russia? If Russia's domestic debates are likened to our own, or if the Western press should begin reporting about all the areas of cultural, economic and political similarities that already exist between Russia and the West, I ask you, how will we preserve a proper sense of Russia's fundamental alienness?

Will we still be able to distinguish clearly between the perfectly tolerable levels of corruption, intolerance, and violence in the West and the totally intolerable levels of the same in Russia? In Russia's reflection, might not our own domestic and foreign policies soon begin appear less than ideal?

This is a very slippery slope. Ultimately, such thinking could lead to questions about whether "Western values" are truly the best for all nations at all times. The faint-hearted among us might even be drawn to consider the possibility of cross-cultural dialogue about the meaning and political usefulness of such terms as "democracy" and "human rights".

Down this treacherous path one can envisage multilateral initiatives, based on more culturally inclusive definitions of democracy, taking the place of the tried and true strategies of "regime change" and "democratic-values education" promoted by the administration of US President George W Bush. Perish the thought!

That is why it is of such vital importance that Putin's uppity attitude be firmly swatted down at every opportunity and why I, for one, applaud the Western media for their diligence in this regard. The alternatives are simply too awful to contemplate.

Nicolai N Petro served as the US State Department's special assistant for policy on the Soviet Union under president George H W Bush, and now teaches international politics at the University of Rhode Island.

Where Is America's Politkovskaya?

2006-10-27T16:44:00.000+04:00

This article by Mark Ames was published in eXile a week ago. Here's the link to the original.

The murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya was one of those horrible events which trigger the worst in everyone, when all the wrong lessons are drawn, and all the spite and savagery explode. Even by the 21st century's already sub-vile standards, her assassination managed to inspire an entirely new level of hysteria, opportunism and tactlessness so sphincter-twisting that it makes you wonder if it wouldn't just be better to hand the entire Judeo-Christian world over to the Chinese now, rather than waiting another agonizing 20 years. At least the Chinese have tact, for chrissakes.

On one side of the Global Toilet was President Putin, normally an impressive politician, but who, at critical times, cannot contain his own viciously raw vanity. By keeping silent for two days after her murder, and then finally speaking out only to minimize her importance, Putin came off looking like a regular asshole. Leaving aside for now the issue of whether or not Putin was "right" in minimizing Politkovskaya's importance in Russia -- technically he was largely "correct" -- what mattered was what his nasty reaction revealed about his character. Any skilled politician would have swallowed his petty grudges and embraced her corpse, squeezing out of it as much political capital as possible. This isn't rocket science stuff -- it's just cynical politicking 101, and it's the right thing to do. Why did Putin's normally adept bloodless skills fail him on this occasion? I think for the same reason that Bush fled from the battle scene on 9/11, snagglepussing at Mach-3 to a snakehole in Nebraska until the coast was long clear, rather than flying straight from Florida to DC and looking the part of the fearless hero. He couldn't help himself. Big, unexpected events reveal the smallness in our leaders.

Most Russians I know reacted somewhere between indifference and mild disgust at the murder. But if you read the Russian internet, you'd realize that Putin came off as a weepy liberal: a good part of the "active" community only wished that Politkovskaya had been killed far more slowly, much sooner, and that they could have perhaps been part of the hit team who did it. Nice, really fucking nice.

On the other side -- the side that matters far more to me -- was the West. Unlike Putin, the Western media wasted no time in seizing Politkovskaya's corpse for their own purposes, parading it around and milking it for every ounce it was worth.

What exactly was Anna Politkovskaya's bullet-riddled corpse worth to the West? No surprise here: A juicy opportunity to demonize Putin and Russia.

Immediately after her murder, Reuters showed how her death was going to be spun with the headline, "Outspoken Putin Critic Shot Dead In Moscow." The implication was obvious: Putin ordered it.

Articles noted that she was killed on Putin's birthday, implying that it was a gift to himself. On the eve of his visit to Germany to close a big energy contract. Can you imagine Putin actually ordering the hit on his birthday, just before meeting Merkel for a key energy summit? "Okay, here's the plan, Sechin. I want you to kill Politkovskaya. I know, it's true that her articles have almost no effect on our policies in Chechnya and are ignored by all but a small percentage of liberal Russians, but so what. Oo, she makes me so angry! Once she's out of the way, my grip on power will finally be secured. Mwah-hah-hah! But wait, that's not all. Oh no, I'm much more dastardly than that. See, I'm not asking for much for my birthday, Sechin. Forget the Bulgari watches that you guys give me every year. I want her corpse brought to me with a big red birthday bow tied around it. I want to kill her on my birthday, just before my big meeting in Germany. They'll understand. After all, they're Germans. You know--Nazis, just like me! Deal? Yeah? Oh, goodie! I'm so deliciously evil, even Stewie would envy me. Why, this is going to be the best birthday of my life! Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!..."

But that was just the beginning. The notoriously Russophobic Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post published an editorial that more directly implicated Putin: "It is quite possible, without performing any detective work, to say what is ultimately responsible for these deaths: It is the climate of brutality that has flourished under Mr. Putin."

This is a cheap way of saying that Putin is responsible, but like most Russia-haters, they leave out some obvious contradictions. Such as, for example, is Putin also responsible for the hit on Paul Klebnikov, who was profoundly pro-Putin? And what about all the journalists murdered during Yeltsin's tenure? Did Hiatt or any of the others ever blame Yeltsin -- the one who truly introduced the brutality, corruption and lawlessness into Russia? No, of course not, because Yeltsin did The West's bidding. Crimes committed while being pro-American simply do not exist.

Anne Applebaum, one of the Post's resident neocons, went the extra sleazy mile when she got ahold of Politkovskaya's corpse. In her October 9th column, "A Moscow Murder Story," Applebaum simply lied about the circumstances of her murder, and quite consciously so, when she essentially blamed Klebnikov's inconvenient death, as well as other provincial journalists killed for investigating local corruption, on Putin. Interestingly, in her article she openly narrows her focus on "journalists killed after 2000" -- gee, how convenient. Because that means she wouldn't have to mention all the journalists killed during Yeltsin's term, since that would muddy up the good/evil picture that her entire thesis rests on.

Applebaum is a special case, one of those moral crusaders, the American Anna Politkovskaya, who has made a living courageously exposing state crimes committed by...get this...not her own country, oh heck no! Because her own country only does good! Nope, Anne Applebaum makes her living by sitting in the safety of Washington DC, and exposing crimes committed by a country on the other side of the globe! That country being Russia of course. Hey, give that woman a Pulitzer, will ya?! Hence her book Gulag, packed with all the affected moral outrage that you'd expect. Indeed, one thing that has always filled Applebaum with rage is wondering why Russians don't take her seriously (a question she poses as more abstract -- ie, why don't Russians care about the Gulags as much as Anne does?). Here's why: Can you imagine how much moral authority a right-wing Russian journalist's book about the American genocide of Indians would have in America? Answer: about as much as Anne's book has in Russia. None.
Yes, it's dangerous work to dedicate your life to exposing the horrors committed by a country that your husband hates. Applebaum's husband is Poland's right-wing Defense Minister Radoslaw Sikorski, who also serves in the neocon American Enterprise Institute, the same institute that essentially invented the current Iraq war. The current government that Sikorski serves in, by the way, includes the extreme right-wing party The League of Polish Families, leading to protests from Israel because of the party's open anti-Semitism and xenophobia, and its notorious skinhead youth group. But that's okay by Anne, because Poland likes America and is a member of the Coalition of the Willing. Meaning no hissy articles from Anne Applebaum about her husband's pals or Poland's repulsive history of Jewish slaughter. Nor will you read too many articles by Applebaum about her own country's atrocious crimes committed in Iraq, and the hundreds of thousands her government has killed.

No person could be as far from Politkovskaya as Anne Applebaum. Given all of Applebaum's influence and access, she only uses that power to demonize Russia and whitewash America's fascism. Politkovskaya, on the other hand, speaking from extreme weakness and danger, used what little influence she had to risk all for the victims of her own goverment's cruelty, fighting from within.

Easily the most absurd Politkovskaya article was by the notorious Brit hack Olga Craig, in her piece in the Sunday Telegraph titled "Cross Putin And Die." It begins with an obviously manufactured story of a terrified small-time journalist supposedly fleeing for his life from Putin's Russia -- the invented journalist is given a pseudonym, "Zakayev," he's apparently so scared... and from there, well, you can fill in the blanks yourself. His alleged crime is that he criticized the disgusting crackdown on ethnic Georgians--and yet, there was vicious open criticism of the crackdown as fascistic all over the Russian print and internet media. But supposedly, this guy had to flee for his life -- "Now 'Zakayev' is convinced that someone, most probably a hired hitman with links to the Kremlin, is already stalking his movements." It's pure cartoon bullshit, one of the worst made-up hack stories you'll read in your life.

But the knockout blow was yet to be delivered. Politkovskaya's corpse could not be buried before the Western press squeezed it for the biggest prize of all: Pure, total demonization. The "F" word. Yes, the Economist declared, "It is an over-used word, and a controversial one, especially in Russia. It is not there yet, but Russia sometimes seems to be heading towards fascism."

If Fascism means gas chambers, then all talk of it is utterly meaningless and empty--it's the most over-abused epithet, and simply by acknowledging that doesn't excuse the Economist of rank historial distortion. However, if "Fascism" means what I think they mean -- violence and lies and hate -- then America, which used a lie as a pretext to invade a country on the other side of the globe, completely leveled a city of 300,000, and killed half a million citizens, all the while violently suppressing the truth and anyone who tries to get it out -- is guilty as charged.

The West has used poor Anna Politkovskaya's corpse to do exactly what she fought against: whipping up national hatred, lying, and focusing on evils committed safely far away, rather than on the evils committed by your own country. The West has exploited her death with all of the crudity and cynicism of an Arab mob funeral...only at least the Arabs use their own people's corpses to demonize an enemy that actually kills them. Whereas in this case, the West stole another country's corpse, then paraded it at home in order to whip up hatred against the corpse's birthplace. It would be like the Palestinians slipping into Tel Aviv, grave-robbing Rabin's corpse after his murder, then parading it around Gaza City, ululating hate towards Israel for allowing the great peacemaker to get killed.

That's kind of how Russians reacted when they saw that the West crudely exploited Politkovskaya's murder. The West's crude reaction only increased Russia's crude counter-reaction...

If you ask me, what is most significant for us in the West about Anna Politkovskaya's death, and her courageous life (btw, a big "fuck you" to our nationalist readers who don't agree with this), is not so much what it says about Russia -- it doesn't say much new at all, to be honest, but instead is another chapter in an increasingly depressing story that started under Yeltsin.
Rather, what is significant about her death is this: Why doesn't America have an Anna Politkovskaya? Why don't we have someone as courageous as she was to tell the story of how we razed Fallujah to the ground Grozny-style? How we bombed to smithereens and ethnically cleansed a city of 300,000 people in retaliation for the deaths of four American contractors? Where is the American Anna Politkovskaya who will tell us about how we directly killed roughly 200,000 Iraqis, and indirectly are responsible for about half a million Iraq deaths since our invasion? Why isn't there a single American willing to risk almost certain death, the way Politkovskaya did, in the pursuit of truth and humanity?

One reason why is because they risk getting killed not only by Iraqi insurgents and Al Qaeda terrorists, but also by the highly efficient American forces. (Not that this stopped Politkovskaya, but it stops America's righteous Politkovskaya-bearers.) And even if they get the story out, it gets quashed by the mainstream press, you lose your job, and you get met by a hostile, even bloodthirsty public who doesn't want to hear about it.

Take the case of Yasser Salihee, an Iraqi correspondent for Knight Ridder. Salihee was shot by an American sniper with a bullet to his head on June 24, 2005. At the time, he was gathering material for an investigative piece about how the US was training death squads -- the very same death squads which are now responsible for the savage civil war that kicked into high gear this year.

Salihee was killed; the American sniper was cleared; and Knight Ridder washed its hands, declaring "there's no reason to think that the shooting had anything to do with his reporting work." Imagine an analogous situation in Chechnya, the hue and cry from the Applebaums -- it'd be as inversely loud as the silence over Salihee's death. At least even the Kremlin admits Politkovskaya was killed for her reporting.

Indeed Salihee is just one of a number of journalists killed in Iraq, by far the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. And it's not all the insurgents' fault either. Some more marginal journalists, from Robert Fisk to Dahr Jamail, have written about how US forces in Iraq target journalists for murder. But no one wants to hear that -- so these kinds of reports stay on the margins. Journalists were targeted and killed at Al Jazeera; at first, reports that the Americans targeted them were dismissed as "conspiracy theory" talk, but recently, admissions that Bush, Blair, and a former Blair minister all explored ways to bomb Al Jazeera during the war are finally raising questions. Well, not really. Should be raising questions, leading to impassioned editorials by the Post and Anne Applebaum. But they're not, because they're too busy demonizing Russia.

Giuliana Sgrena, the Italian journalist who was kidnapped last year in Iraq and freed by an Italian intelligence agent, was shot and wounded (the agent was killed) by US forces when she was returning to freedom. She insisted that US troops deliberately targeted her. A smear campaign in the US press -- labeling her a Communist and an anti-American with Stockholm Syndrome-- effectively nullified her story, but even pro-Bush Berlusconi was so incensed by the incident that he started to back away from Bush's war.

Italian TV later discovered evidence that US forces had used an illegal WMD, white phosphorus chemicals, during its destruction of Fallujah the year before. In spite of all the evidence, including burned corpses whose clothes were still intact, eyewitnesses, and even friendly Iraqi ministers who denounced it, the American media largely ignored it. Why the fuck did Italian TV, and not American TV, break this story? Where was Anne Applebaum on the atrocities in Fallujah?

The case of Eason Jordan, CNN's longtime superstar news chief, might explain the mainstream American media's silence. This is what happens when you're a mainstream American media man who dares to tell the ugly truth about Iraq. While hobnobbing with the Global Aristocracy at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January of 2005, Jordan made the mistake of telling his fellow elite what was really happening in Iraq: American forces were "out to get journalists, and some were deliberately targeting journalists."

Within two weeks, the longtime CNN honcho was out of work. His resignation came complete with a Stalin-esque confession that's chilling to read today:
"After 23 years at CNN," he wrote, "I have decided to resign in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy over conflicting accounts of my recent remarks regarding the alarming number of journalists killed in Iraq. I never meant to imply U.S. forces acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists, and I apologize to anyone who thought I said or believed otherwise."

Yes, he was a wrecker and a Trotskyite, and he begged for forgiveness. Because the man was dead -- in America, losing your job like that, after bad-mouthing America, means you're as good as dead.

A number of journalists have had their careers destroyed for not following the Party Line: Peter Arnett, Ashleigh Banfield, to name two of the most prominent. Meanwhile, the editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post who pushed for war, who spread lies about WMDs and helped bring about the 500,000 deaths reported today (a figure that of course is being attacked and demonized by the same people who cheer an organization's "courage" when such figures are arrived at in Chechnya), get to keep their jobs.

You can see now why we have no Politkovskaya, as badly as we need one. If you go against the "fascist" tendency in your home country, you're targeted for death and career destruction by the government and a bloodthirsty right-wing population. Just as with Chechnya, Iraq has been made too dangerous to work in, and the American government has put a perfectly air-tight lid on information, not even allowing photographs of the coffins of dead American servicemen.
The way Putin managed to bring the media more tightly under his heel than Yeltsin managed during his tenure was by a combination of brute intimidation and career-intimidation. Media heads were pressured, critics were harassed and ruthlessly mocked. Putin also managed to tap into a growing nationalist backlash against the anti-government criticism in the liberal media, much as Republicans constantly tap the American public's rabid patriotism and hatred of the "liberal media" for criticizing or questioning right-wing, militaristic policies. All of the good Russian journalists I know got out a few years ago because it was a bad career, unless you were going to do the equivalent of FOX News, which most refused to do. American journalists, on the other hand, manage to stay working under these circumstances because they can comfort themselves with homegrown lies, such as, "Sure I'd like to print something else, but I don't want to risk it. But the difference is, at least we have the RIGHT to publish what we want about Iraq."

The lesson of Anna Politkovskaya's fearless journalism was completely lost on the West. It's up to Russians to figure out the significance of her murder to their culture and their civilization. But in a West increasingly drowning in lies, war, murder and hatred, the last thing her death should give us is the opportunity to create another enemy, another nation to hate, another regime to be changed.

Mark Ames "Where Is America's Politkovskaya?"

The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically

2006-10-20T14:50:00.000+04:00

The Emerging Russian Giant Plays its Cards Strategically

by F. William Engdahl

October 7, 2006
GlobalResearch.ca

The September 2006 summit in Paris between Russia’s Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, underscored the re-emerging of Russia as a major global power. The new Russia is gaining in influence through a series of strategic moves revolving around its geopolitical assets in energy—most notably its oil and natural gas. It’s doing so by shrewdly taking advantage of the strategic follies and major political blunders of Washington. The new Russia also realizes that if it does not act decisively, it soon will be encircled and trumped by a military rival, USA, for which it has little defenses left. The battle, largely unspoken, is the highest stakes battle in world politics today. Iran and Syria are seen by Washington strategists as mere steps to this great Russian End Game.

The formal Paris summit agenda included French investment in Russia and the issue of Iran’s (Russian-built) nuclear program. Notably, however, it also included the question of future Russian energy supplies to the European Union, notably, Germany. It was an indication of the new strength of Putin’s Russia. Putin told the German Chancellor that Russia would ‘possibly’ redirect some of the future natural gas from its giant Shtokman field in the Barents Sea. The $20 billion project is due to come online 2010 and had been slated to provide liquified natural gas to United States terminals.

Since the devastating setbacks two years ago from the US-sponsored ‘color revolutions’ in Georgia, and then Ukraine, Russia has begun to play its strategic energy cards extremely carefully, from nuclear reactors in Iran to military sales to Venezuela and other Latin American states, to strategic market cooperation deals in natural gas with Algeria.

At the same time, the Bush Administration has dug itself deeper into a geopolitical morass, through a foreign policy agenda which has reckless disregard for its allies as well as its foes. That reckless policy has been associated with former Halliburton CEO, Dick Cheney, more than any other figure in Washington.

The ‘Cheney Presidency,’ which is what historians will no doubt dub the George W. Bush years, has been based on a clear strategy. It has often been misunderstood by critics who had overly focussed on its most visible component, namely, Iraq, the Middle East and the strident war-hawks around the Vice President and his old crony, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld.

The ‘Cheney strategy’ has been a US foreign policy based on securing direct global energy control, control by the Big Four US or US-tied private oil giants-- ChevronTexaco or ExxonMobil, BP or Royal Dutch Shell. Above all, it has aimed at control of all the world’s major oil regions, along with the major natural gas fields. That control has moved in tandem with a growing bid by the United States for total military primacy over the one potential threat to its global ambitions—Russia. Cheney is perhaps the ideal person to weave the US military and energy policies together into a coherent strategy of dominance. During the early 1990’s under father Bush, Cheney was also Secretary of Defense.

The Cheney-Bush administration has been dominated by a coalition of interests between Big Oil and the top industries of the American military-industrial complex. These private corporate interests exercise their power through control of the government policy of the United States. An aggressive militaristic agenda has been essential to it. It is epitomized by Cheney’s former company, Halliburton Inc., at one and the same time the world’s largest energy and geophysical services company, and the world’s largest constructor of military bases.

To comprehend the policy it’s important to look at how Cheney, as Halliburton CEO, viewed the problem of future oil supply on the eve of his becoming Vice President.

‘Where the Prize Ultimately Lies’: Cheney’s 1999 London speech

Back in September 1999, a full year before the US elections which made him the most powerful Vice President in history, Cheney gave a revealing speech before his oil industry peers at the London Institute of Petroleum.. In a global review of the outlook for Big Oil, Cheney made the following comment:

"By some estimates there will be an average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? Governments and the national oil companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets. Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies. Even though companies are anxious for greater access there, progress continues to be slow. It is true that technology, privatisation and the opening up of a number of countries have created many new opportunities in areas around the world for various oil companies, but looking back to the early 1990‘s, expectations were that significant amounts of the world‘s new resources would come from such areas as the former Soviet Union and from China. Of course that didn‘t turn out quite as expected. Instead it turned out to be deep water successes that yielded the bonanza of the 1990‘s."

The Cheney remarks are worth a careful reading. He posits a conservative rise in global demand for oil by the end of the present decade, i.e. in about 4 years. He estimates the world will need to find an added 50 million barrels of daily output. Total daily oil production at present hovers around the level of some 83 million barrels oil equivalent. This means that to avert catastrophic shortages and the resultant devastating impact on global economic growth, by Cheney’s 1999 estimate, the world must find new oil production equal to more than 50% of the 1999 daily global output, and that, by about 2010. That is the equivalent of five new oil regions equal to today’s Saudi Arabian size. That is a whopping amount of new oil.

Given that it can take up to seven years or more to bring a new major oilfield into full production, that’s also not much time if a horrendous energy crunch and sky-high oil and gas prices are to be averted. Cheney’s estimate was also based on an overly conservative estimate of future oil import demand in China and India, today the two fastest growing oil consumers on the planet.

A second notable point of Cheney’s 1999 London comments was his remark that, ‘the Middle East with two thirds of the world‘s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.’ However, as he revealingly remarked, the oil ‘prize’ of the Middle East was in national or government hands, not open to exploitation by the private market, and thus, hard for Cheney’s Halliburton and his friends in ExxonMobil or Chevron or Shell or BP to get their hands on.

At that time, Iraq, with the second largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, was under the rule of Saddam Hussein. Iran, which has the world’s second largest reserves of natural gas, in addition to its huge oil reserves, was ruled by a nationalist theocracy which was not open to US private company oil tenders. The Caspian Sea oil reserves were a subject of bitter geopolitical battle between Washington and Russia.

Cheney’s remark that ‘Oil remains fundamentally a government business,’ and not private, takes on a new significance when we do a fast forward to September 2000, in the heat of the 2000 Bush-Cheney election campaign. That month Cheney, along with Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and many others who went on to join the new Bush Administration, issued a policy report titled, ‘Re-building America’s Defenses.’ The paper was issued by an entity named Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Cheney’s PNAC group called on the new US President-to-be to find a suitable pretext to declare war on Iraq, in order to occupy it and take direct control over the second largest oil reserves in the Middle East. Their report stated bluntly, ‘While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification (sic), the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein ...’

Cheney signed on to a policy document in September 2000 which declared that the key issue was ‘American force presence in the Gulf,’ and regime change in Iraq, regardless whether Saddam Hussein was good, bad or ugly. It was the first step in moving the US military to ‘where the prize ultimately lies.’

No coincidence that Cheney immediately got the task of heading a Presidential Energy Task Force review in early 2001, where he worked closely with his friends in Big Oil, including the late Ken Lay of Enron, with whom Cheney earlier had been involved in an Afghan gas pipeline project, as well as with James Baker III.

Buried in the debate leading to the US bombing and occupation of Iraq in March 2003 was a lawsuit under the US Freedom of Information Act brought by Sierra Club and Judicial Watch., initially to find data on Cheney’s role in the California energy crisis. The suit demanded that Vice President Cheney make public all documents and records of meetings related to his 2001 Energy Task Force project.

The US Commerce Department in summer 2003 ultimately released part of the documents, over ferocious Cheney and White House opposition. Amid the files of the domestic US energy review was, curiously enough, a detailed map of Iraqi oilfields, pipelines, refineries and terminals, as well as two charts detailing Iraqi oil and gas projects, and ‘Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.’ The ‘foreign suitors’ included Russia, China and France, three UN Security Council members who openly opposed granting the US UN approval for invading Iraq.

The first act of post-war occupation by Washington was to declare null and void any contracts between the Iraqi government and Russia, China and France. Iraqi oil was to be an American affair, handled by American companies or their close cronies in Britain, the first victory in the high-stakes quest, ‘where the prize ultimately lies.’

This was precisely what Cheney had alluded to in his 1999 London speech. Get the Middle East oil resources out of independent national hands and into US-controlled hands. The military occupation of Iraq was the first major step in this US strategy. Control of Russian energy reserves, however, was Washington’s ultimate ‘prize.’

De-construction of Russia: The ‘ultimate prize’

For obvious military and political reasons, Washington could not admit openly that its strategic focus, since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, had been the dismemberment or de-construction of Russia, and gaining effective control of its huge oil and gas resources, the ‘ultimate prize.’ The Russian Bear still had formidable military means, however dilapidated, and she still had nuclear teeth.

In the mid-1990’s Washington began a deliberate process of bringing one after the other former satellite Soviet state into not just the European Union, but into the Washington-dominated NATO. By 2004 Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia all had been admitted into NATO, and the Republic of Georgia was being groomed to join.

This surprising spread of NATO, to the alarm of some in western Europe, as well as to Russia, had been part of the strategy advocated by Cheney’s friends at the Project for the New American Century, in their ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ report and even before.

Already in 1996, PNAC member and Cheney crony, Bruce Jackson, then a top executive with US defense giant, LockheedMartin, was head of the US Committee to Expand NATO, later renamed the US Committee on Nato, a very powerful Washington lobby group.

The US Committee to Expand NATO also included PNAC members Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Stephen Hadley and Robert Kagan. Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland, now the US Ambassador to NATO. From 2000 - 2003, she was a foreign policy advisor to Cheney. Hadley, a hardline hawk close to Vice President Cheney, was named by President Bush to replace Condoleezza Rice as his National Security Adviser.

The warhawk Cheney network moved from the PNAC into key posts within the Bush Administration to run NATO and Pentagon policy. Bruce Jackson and others, after successfully lobbying Congress to expand NATO to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999, moved to organize the so-called Vilnius Group that lobbied to bring ten more former Warsaw Pact countries on Russia’s periphery into NATO. Jackson called this the ‘Big Bang.’

President Bush repeatedly used the term ‘New Europe’ in statements about NATO enlargement. In a July 5, 2002 speech hailing the leaders of the Vilnius group, Bush declared, ‘Our nations share a common vision of a new Europe, where free European states are united with each other, and with the United States through cooperation, partnership, and alliance.’

Lockheed Martin’s former executive, Bruce Jackson, took credit for bringing the Baltic and other members of the Vilnius Group into NATO. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 1, 2003, Jackson claimed he originated the ‘Big Bang’ concept of NATO enlargement, later adopted by the Vilnius Group of Baltic and Eastern European nations. As Jackson noted, his ‘Big Bang’ briefing ‘proposed the inclusion of these seven countries in NATO and claimed for this enlargement strategic advantages for NATO and moral (sic) benefits for the democratic community of nations.’ On May 19, 2000 in Vilnius, Lithuania, these propositions were adopted by nine of Europe's new democracies as their own. It became the objectives of the Vilnius Group.’ Jackson could also have noted the benefits to US military defense industry, including his old cronies at Lockheed Martin, with the creation of a vast new NATO arms market on the borders to Russia.

Once that NATO goal was reached, Bruce Jackson and other members of the NATO eastern expansion lobby, closed the US Committee on Nato in 2003, and, seamlessly, in the very same office, re-opened as a new lobby organization, the Project on Transitional Democracies, which according to their own statement was ‘organized to exploit the opportunities to accelerate democratic reform and integration which we believe will exist in the broader Euro-Atlantic region over the next decade.’ In other words, to foster the series of Color Revolutions and regime change across Russian Eurasia. All three principals of the Project on Transitional Democracies worked for the Republican Party, and Jackson and Scheunemann have close ties with major military contractors, notably Lockheed Martin and Boeing.

Jackson and other PNAC and U.S. Committee on NATO members also created a powerful lobby organization, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI). CLI's advisory panel included hardline Democrats such as Rep. Stephen Solarz and Sen. Robert Kerrey. It was dominated by neo-conservatives and Republican Party stalwarts like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Robert Kagan, Richard Perle, William Kristol, and former CIA Director, James Woolsey. Serving as honorary co-chairs were Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John McCain (R-AZ). Jackson related that friends in the White House had asked him to create the CRI in 2002 to replicate the success he had had pushing for NATO expansion through his US. Committee on NATO by establishing an outfit aimed at supporting the administration's campaign to convince Congress and the public to support a war. “‘People in the White House said, ‘We need you to do for Iraq what you did for NATO',” Jackson told American Prospect magazine in a January 1, 2003 interview.

In brief, NATO encirclement of Russia, Color Revolutions across Eurasia, and the war in Iraq, were all one and the same American geopolitical strategy, part of a grand strategy to ultimately de-construct Russia once and for all as a potential rival to a sole US Superpower hegemony. Russia-- not Iraq and not Iran-- was the primary target of that strategy.

During a White House welcoming ceremony to greet the ten new NATO members in 2004, President Bush noted that NATO’s mission now extended far beyond the perimeter of the alliance. ‘NATO members are reaching out to the nations of the Middle East, to strengthen our ability to fight terror, and to provide for our common security,’ he said. But NATO’s mission now would extend beyond even global security. Bush added, ‘We’re discussing how we can support and increase the momentum of freedom in the greater Middle East.’ Freedom, that is, to come into the orbit of a Washington-controlled NATO alliance.

The end of the Yeltsin era put a slight crimp in the US plans. Putin began slowly and cautiously to emerge as a dynamic national force, committed to rebuilding Russia, following the IMF-guided looting of the country by a combination of Western banks and corrupt Russian oligarchs.

Russian oil output had risen since the collapse of the Soviet Union to the point that, by the time of the 2003 US war on Iraq, Russia was the world’s second largest oil producer behind Saudi Arabia.

The real significance of the Yukos Affair

The defining event in the new Russian energy geopolitics under Vladimir Putin took place in 2003. It was just as Washington was making it brutally clear it was going to militarize Iraq and the Middle East, regardless of world protest or UN niceties.

A brief review of the spectacular October 2003 arrest of Russia’s billionaire ‘oligarch’ Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and state seizure of his giant Yukos oil group, is essential to understand Russian energy geopolitics.

Khodorkovsky was arrested at Novosibirsk airport on October 25, 2003, by the Russian Prosecutor General's office on charges of tax evasion. The Putin government froze shares of Yukos Oil because of tax charges. They then took further actions against Yukos, leading to a collapse in the share price.

What was little mentioned in Western media accounts, which typically portrayed the Putin government actions as a reversion to Soviet-era methods, was what had triggered Putin’s dramatic action in the first place.

Khodorkovsky had been arrested just four weeks before a decisive Russian Duma or lower house election, in which Khodorkovsky had managed to buy the votes of a majority in the Duma using his vast wealth. Control of the Duma was to be the first step by Khodorkovsky in a plan to run against Putin the next year as President. The Duma victory would have allowed him to change election laws in his favor, as well as to alter a controversial law being drafted in the Duma, ‘The Law on Underground Resources.’ That law would prevent Yukos and other private companies from gaining control of raw materials in the ground, or from developing private pipeline routes independent of the Russian state pipelines.

Khodorkovsky had violated the pledge of the Oligarchs made to Putin, that they be allowed to keep their assets--de facto stolen from the state in the rigged auctions under Yeltsin--if they stayed out of Russian politics and repatriated a share of their stolen money. Khodorkovsky, the most powerful oligarch at the time, was serving as the vehicle for what was becoming an obvious Washington-backed putsch against Putin.

The Khodorkovsky arrest followed an unpublicized meeting earlier that year on July 14, 2003 between Khodorkovsky and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Following the Cheney meeting, Khodorkovsky began talks with ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco, Condi Rice’s old firm, about taking a major state in Yukos, said to have been between 25% and 40%. That was intended to give Khodorkovsky de facto immunity from possible Putin government interference by tying Yukos to the big US oil giants and, hence, to Washington. It would also have given Washington, via the US oil giants, a de facto veto power over future Russian oil and gas pipelines and oil deals. Days before his October 2003 arrest on tax fraud charges, Khodorkovsky had entertained George H.W. Bush, the representative of the powerful and secretive Washington Carlyle Group in Moscow. They were discussing the final details of the US oil company share buy-in of Yukos.

Yukos had also just made a bid to acquire rival Sibneft from Boris Berezovsky, another Yeltsin-era Oligarch. YukosSibneft, with 19.5 billion barrels of oil and gas, would then own the second-largest oil and gas reserves in the world after ExxonMobil. YukosSibneft would be the fourth largest in the world in terms of production, pumping 2.3 million barrels of crude oil a day. The Exxon or Chevron buy-up of YukosSibneft would have been a literal energy coup d’etat. Cheney knew it; Bush knew it; Khodorkovsky knew it.

Above all, Vladimir Putin knew it and moved decisively to block it.

Khodokorvsky had cultivated very impressive ties to the Anglo-American power establishment. He created a philanthropic foundation, the Open Russia Foundation, modelled on the Open Society foundation of his close friend George Soros. On the select board of Open Russia Foundation sat Henry Kissinger and Kissinger’s friend, Jacob Lord Rothschild, London scion of the banking family. Arthur Hartman, a former US Ambassador to Moscow, also sat on the foundation’s board.

Following Khodorkovsky's arrest, the Washington Post reported that the imprisoned Russian billionaire had retained the services of Stuart Eizenstat - former deputy Treasury Secretary, Undersecretary of State, Undersecretary of Commerce during the Clinton Administration - to lobby in Washington for his freedom. Khodorkovsky was in deep with the Anglo-American establishment.

Subsequent western media and official protest about Russia’s return to communist methods and raw power politics, conveniently ignored the fact that Khodorkovsky was hardly Snow White himself. Earlier, Khodorkovsky had unilaterally ripped up his contract with British Petroleum. BP had been a partner with Yukos, and had spent $300 million in drilling the highly promising Priobskoye oil field in Siberia.

Once the BP drilling had been done, Khodorkovsky forced BP out, using gangster methods that would be unlawful in most of the developed world. By 2003 Priobskoye oil production reached 129 million barrels, equivalent to a value on the market of some $8 billions. Earlier, in 1998, after the IMF had given billions to Russia to prevent a collapse of the Ruble, Khodokorvosky’s Bank Menatep diverted an eye-popping $4.8 billion in IMF funds to his hand-picked bank cronies, some US banks among them. The howls of protest from Washington at the October 2003 arrest of Khodorkovsky were disingenuous, if not outright hypocritical. As seen from the Kremlin, Washington had been caught with its fat hand in the Russian cookie jar.

The Putin-Khodorkovsky showdown signalled a decisive turn by the Putin government towards rebuilding Russia and erecting strategic defenses from the foreign onslaught led by Cheney and friend Tony Blair in Britain. It took place in the context of a brazen US grab for Iraq in 2003 and of a unilateral Bush Administration announcement that the USA was abrogating its solemn treaty obligations with Russia under their earlier Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, in order to go ahead with development of US missile defenses, an act which could only be viewed in Moscow as a hostile act aimed at her security.

By 2003, indeed, it took little strategic military prowess to realize that the Pentagon hawks and their allies in the military industry and Big Oil had a vision of a United States unfettered by international agreements and acting unilaterally in its own best interests, as defined, of course, by the hawks. Their recommendations were published by one of the many Washington hawk conservative Think-Tanks. In January 2001 The National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) issued Rationale and Requirements for U.S. Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, just as the Bush-Cheney Administration began. The report, demanding a unilateral US end to nuclear force reduction, was signed by 27 senior officials from past and current administrations. The list included the man who today is Bush’s National Security Adviser, Stephen Hadley; it included the special assistant to the Secretary of Defense, Stephen Cambone, and it included Admiral James Woolsey, the former head of CIA and chairman of the Washington NGO, Freedom House. Freedom House played a central role in Ukraine’s US-sponsored ‘Orange Revolution’ and all other ‘Color Revolutions’ across the former Soviet Union.

These events were soon followed by the Washington-financed series of covert destabilizations of a number of governments in Russia’s periphery which had been close to Moscow. It included the November 2003 ‘Rose Revolution’ in Georgia which ousted Edouard Shevardnadze in favour of a young, US-educated and pro-NATO President, Mikheil Saakashvili. The 37-year-old Saakashvili had conveniently agreed to back the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline that would avoid Moscow pipeline control of Azerbaijan’s Caspian oil. The United States has maintained close ties with Georgia since President Mikheil Saakashvili has come to power. American military trainers instruct Georgian troops and Washington has poured millions of dollars into preparing Georgia to become part of NATO.

Following its Rose Revolution in Georgia, Woolsey’s Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Soros Foundation and other Washington-backed NGOs organized the brazenly provocative November 2004 Ukraine ‘Orange Revolution.’ The aim of the Orange Revolution was to install a pro-NATO regime there under the contested Presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, in a land strategically able to cut the major pipeline flows from Russian oil and gas to Western Europe. Washington-backed ‘democratic opposition’ movements in neighboring Belarus also began receiving millions of dollars of Bush Administration largesse, along with Kyrgystan, Uzbekistan and more remote former Soviet states which also happen to form a barrier between potential energy pipelines linking China with Russia and the former Soviet states like Kazkhstan..

Again, energy and oil and gas pipeline control lay at the heart of the US moves. Little wonder, perhaps, that some people inside the Kremlin, notably Vladimir Putin, began to wonder if Putin’s new born-again Texan partner-in-prayer, George W. Bush, was in fact speaking to Putin with forked tongue, as the Indians would say.

By the end of 2004 it was clear in Moscow that a new Cold War, this one over strategic energy control and unilateral nuclear primacy, was fully underway. It was also clear from the unmistakeable pattern of Washington actions since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, that End Game for USA policy vis-?-vis Eurasia was not China, not Iraq, and not Iran.

The geopolitical ‘End Game’ for Washington was the complete de-construction of Russia, the one state in Eurasia capable of organizing an effective combination of alliances using its vast oil and gas resources. That, of course, could never be openly declared.

After 2003 Putin and Russian foreign policy, especially energy policy, reverted to their basic response to the ‘Heartland’ geopolitics of Sir Halford Mackinder, politics which had been the basis of Soviet Cold War strategy since 1946.

Putin began to make a series of defensive moves to restore some tenable form of equilibrium in face of the increasingly obvious Washington policy of encircling and weakening Russia. Subsequent US strategic blunders have made the job a bit easier for Russia. Now, with the stakes rising on both sides—NATO and Russia—Putin’s Russia has moved beyond simple defense to a new dynamic offensive, to secure a more viable geopolitical position, using its energy as the lever.

Mackinder’s Heartland and Brzezinski’s Chess Game

It’s essential to understand the historic background to the term geopolitics. In 1904, an academic British geographer named Halford Mackinder made an address before the Royal Geographic Society in London which was to change history. In his speech, titled, ‘The Geographical Pivot of History,’ Mackinder sought to define the relation between a nation’s or region’s geography—its topography, relation to the sea or land, its climate—with its politics and position in the world. He posited two classes of powers: sea powers including Britain and the United States as well as Japan; and he posited the large land powers of Eurasia, which, with development of the railroad, were able to unite large land masses free from dependency on the seas.

For Mackinder, an ardent Empire advocate, the implicit lesson for continued hegemony of the British Empire following the 1914-1917 World War, was to prevent at all costs a convergence of interests between the nations of East Europe—Poland, Czechoslovakia , Austria-Hungary--and the Russia-centered Eurasia ‘Heartland’ or ‘pivot’ land,as he termed it. After the Versailles peace talks, Mackinder summed up his ideas in the following famous dictum:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;
Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island;
Who rules the World-Island commands the world.
Mackinder's Heartland was the core area of Eurasia, and the World-Island was all of Eurasia, including Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Great Britain, never a part of Continental Europe, he saw as a separate naval or sea-power. The Mackinder geopolitical perspective shaped Britain’s entry into the 1914 Great War, it shaped her entry into World War Two. It shaped Churchill’s calculated provocations of an increasingly paranoid Stalin, beginning 1943, to entice Russia into what became the Cold War.

From a US perspective, the 1946-1991 Cold War era was all about who shall control Mackinder’s World-Island, and, concretely, how to prevent the Eurasian Heartland, centered on Russia, from doing just that. A look at a polar projection map of US military alliances during the Cold War makes the point: The Soviet Union had been geopolitically contained and prevented from any significant linkup with Western Europe or the Middle East or Asia. The Cold War was about Russian efforts to circumvent that NATO-centered Iron Curtain.

Former US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, writing in the post-Soviet era in 1997, drew on Mackinder’s geopolitics by name, in describing the principal strategic aim of the United States to keep Eurasia from unifying as a coherent economic and military bloc or counterweight to the sole superpower status of the United States.

To understand US foreign policy since the onset of the Bush-Cheney Presidency in 2001, therefore, it’s useful to cite a revealing New York Council on Foreign Relations Foreign Affairs article by Brzezinski from September/October 1997:

"Eurasia is home to most of the world's politically assertive and dynamic states. All the historical pretenders to global power originated in Eurasia. The world's most populous aspirants to regional hegemony, China and India, are in Eurasia, as are all the potential political or economic challengers to American primacy. After the United States, the next six largest economies and military spenders are there, as are all but one of the world's overt nuclear powers, and all but one of the covert ones. Eurasia accounts for 75 percent of the world's population, 60 percent of its GNP, and 75 percent of its energy resources. Collectively, Eurasia's potential power overshadows even America's.

Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy...’(emphasis added-w.e.)

If we take the words of Washington strategist Brzezinski and understand the axioms of Halford Mackinder as the driving motive for Anglo, and later, American foreign policy for more than an entire century, it begins to become clear why a reorganized Russian state under the Presidency of Vladimir Putin has gone into motion to resist the overtures and overt attempts at deconstruction being promoted by Washington in the name of democracy. How has Putin acted to shore up Russian defenses? In a word: energy.

Russian energy geopolitics

In terms of the overall standard of living, mortality and economic prosperity, Russia today is not a world class power. In terms of energy, it is a colossus. In terms of landmass it is still the single largest nation in land area in the world, spanning from the Pacific to the door of Europe. It has vast territory, vast natural resources, and it has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas, the energy source currently the focus of major global power plays. In addition, it is the only power on the face of the earth with the military capabilities able to match that of the United States despite the collapse of the USSR and deterioration in the military since.

Russia has more than 130,000 oil wells and some 2000 oil and gas deposits explored of which at least 900 are not in use. Oil reserves have been estimated at 150 billion barrels, similar perhaps to Iraq. They could be far larger but have not yet been exploited owing to difficulty of drilling in some remote arctic regions. Oil prices above $60 a barrel begin to make it economical to explore in those remote regions.

Currently Russian oil products can be exported to foreign markets in three routes: Western Europe via the Baltic Sea and Black Sea; Northern route; Far East to China or Japan and East Asian markets. Russia has oil terminals on the Baltic at St. Petersburg for oil and a newly expanded oil terminal at Primorsk. There are added oil terminals under construction at Vysotsk, Batareynaya Bay and Ust-Luga.

Russia’s state-owned natural gas pipeline network, its so-called ‘unified gas transportation system’ includes a vast network of pipelines and compressor stations extending more than 150,000 kilometers across Russia. By law only the state-owned Gazprom is allowed to use the pipeline. The network is perhaps the most valued Russian state asset outside the oil and gas itself. Here is the heart of Putin’s new natural gas geopolitics and the focus of conflict with western oil and gas companies as well as the European Union, whose Energy Commissioner, Andras Piebalgs, is from new NATO member Latvia, formerly part of the USSR.

In 2001, as it became clear in Moscow that Washington would find a way to bring the Baltic republics into NATO, Putin backed the development of a major new oil port on the Russian coast of the Baltic Sea in Primorsk at a cost of $2.2 billion. This project, known as the Baltic Pipeline System (BPS), greatly lessens export dependency on Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. The Baltic is Russia’s main oil export route, carrying crude oil from Russia's West Siberian and Timan-Pechora oil provinces westward to the port of Primorsk in the Russian Gulf of Finland. The BPS was completed in March 2006 with capacity to carry more than1.3 million barrels/day of Russian oil to western markets in Europe and beyond.

The same month, March 2006, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was named chairman of a Russian-German consortium building a natural gas pipeline going some 1,200 km under the Baltic Sea. Majority shareholder in this North European Gas Pipeline (NEGP) project, with 51%, is the Russian state-controlled Gazprom, the world’s largest natural gas company. The German companies BASF and E.On each hold 24.5%. The project, estimated to cost €4.7 billion, was started late 2005 and will connect the gas terminal at the Russian port city of Vyborg on the Baltic near St. Petersburg with the Baltic city of Greifswald in eastern Germany. The Yuzhno-Russkoye gas field in West Siberia will be developed in a joint venture between Gazprom and BASF to feed the pipeline. It was Gerhard Schroeder’s last major act as Chancellor, and provoked howls of protest from the pro-Washington Polish government, as well as Ukraine, who both stood to lose control over pipeline flows from Russia. Despite her close ties to the Bush Administration, Chancellor Angela Merkel has been forced to swallow hard and accept the project. Germany’s industry is simply dependent on the Russian energy import. Russia is by far the largest supplier of natural gas to Germany.

The giant Shtokman gas deposit in the Russian sector of the Barents Sea, north of the Murmansk harbor, will ultimately also be a part of the gas supply of the NEGP. When completed in two parallel pipelines, NEGP will supply Germany up to 55 billion cubic meters more a year of Russian gas.

In April 2006 the Putin government announced the first stage of construction of the East Siberia-Pacific Ocean Pipeline (ESPO), a vast oil pipeline from Taishet in the Irkutsk Region near Lake Baikal in East Siberia, to Perevoznaya Bay on Russia’s Pacific Ocean coast, to be built at a cost of more than $11.5 billion. Transneft, the Russian state-owned pipeline company will build it. When finished, it will pump up to 1.6 million barrels/day from Siberia to the Russian Far East and from there on to the energy-hungry Asia-Pacific, mainly to China. The first stage is due to be completed by end of 2008. In addition, Putin has announced plans to construct an oil refinery on the Amur River near the China border in Russia’s Far East to allow sale of refined product to China and Asian markets. Presently the Siberian oil can only be delivered to the Pacific via rail.

For Russia, the Taishet to Perevoznaya route will maximize its national strategic benefits while taking oil exports to China and Japan into account at the same time. In the future, the country will be able to export oil to Japan directly from the Nakhodka Port. Oil-import-dependent Japan is frantic to find new secure oil sources outside the unstable Middle East. The ESPO can also supply oil to the Republic of Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea through building from Vladivostok branch lines leading to the two countries and to China via a branch pipe between Blagoveshchensk and Daqing. The Taishet route provides a clear roadmap for energy cooperation between Russia and China, Japan and other Asia-Pacific countries.

Sakhalin: Russia reins in Big Oil

In late September 2006 a seemingly minor dispute exploded and resulted in the revocation of the environmental permit for Royal Dutch Shell’s Sakhalin II Liquified Natural Gas project, which had been due to deliver LNG to Japan, South Korea and other customers by 2008. Shell is lead energy partner in an Anglo-Japanese oil and gas development project on Russia’s Far East island of Sakhalin, a vast island north of Hokkaido Japan.

At the same time, the Putin government announced environmental requirements had also not been met by ExxonMobil for their De Kastri oil terminal built on Sakhalin as part of its Sakhalin I oil and gas development project. Sakhalin I contains an estimated 8 billion barrels of oil and vast volumes of gas, making the field a rare Super-Giant oil find, in geologists’ terminology.

In the early 1990’s the Yeltsin government made a desperation bid to attract needed investment capital and technology into exploiting Russian oil and gas regions at a time the government was broke and oil prices very low. In a bold departure, Yeltsin granted US and other western oil majors generous exploration rights to two large oil projects, Sakhalin I and Sakhalin II. Under a so-called PSA or Production Sharing Agreement, ExxonMobil, lead partner of the Sakhalin I oil project, got tax-free Russian concessions.

Under the terms of the PSA’s, typical between major Anglo-American oil majors and weak Third World countries, Russia’s government would instead get paid for the oil and gas rights in a share of eventual oil or gas produced. But the first drops of oil to Russia would flow only after all project production costs had first been covered. PSA’s were originally developed by Washington and Big Oil to facilitate favorable control by the oil companies of large oil projects in third countries. The major US oil giants, working with the James Baker’s James Baker Institute, which drafted Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Task Force Review, used the PSA form to regain control over Iraq’s oil production, hidden behind the fa?ade of an Iraqi state-owned oil company.

Shortly before the Russian government told ExxonMobil it had problems with its terminal on Sakhalin, ExxonMobil had announced yet another cost increase in the project. ExxonMobil, whose attorney is James Baker III, and which is a close partner to the Cheney-Bush White House, announced a 30% cost increase, something that would put even further off any Russian oil flow share from the PSA. The news came on the eve of ExxonMobil plans to open an oil terminal at De Kastri on Sakhalin. The Russian Environment Ministry and the Agency for Subsoil Use suddenly announced the terminal did ‘not meet environmental requirements’ and is reportedly considering halting production by ExxonMobil as well.

Britain’s Royal Dutch Shell under another PSA holds rights to develop the oil and gas resources in Sakhalin II region, and build Russia’s first Liquified Natural Gas project. The $20 billion project, employing over 17,000 people, is 80% complete. It’s the world’s largest integrated oil and gas project, and includes Russia’s first offshore oil production, as well as Russia’s first offshore integrated gas platform.

The clear Russian government moves against ExxonMobil and Shell have been interpreted in the industry as an atttempt by the Putin government to regain control of Russian oil and gas resources it gave away during the Yeltsin era. It would cohere with Putin’s emerging energy strategy.

Russia-Turkey Blue Stream gas project

In November 2005 Russia’s Gazprom completed the final stage of its 1,213 kilometer $3.2 billion Blue Stream gas pipeline. The project brings gas from its gas fields in Krasnodar, then by underwater pipelines across the Black Sea to the Durusu Terminal near Samsun inon the Turkish Black Sea coast. From there the pipeline supplies Russian gas to Ankara. When it reaches full capacity in 2010 it will carry an estimated 16 billion cubic meters gas a year.

Gazprom is now discussing transit of Russian gas to the countries of South Europe and East Mediterranean, including based on new contracts and new volumes of gas. Greece, South Italy and Israel all are in some form of negotiation with Gazprom to tap gas from the Blue Stream pipeline across the territory of Turkey. A new route for the gas supply is being developed now - the one via the countries of East and Central Europe. The interim title of the project is the South-European Gas Pipeline. The main issue here is to establish a new gas transmission system, both from Russian origin and from the third countries

In sum, not including the emerging potentials of Gazprom’s entry into the fast-developing Liquified Natural Gas markets globally, energy, oil and gas and nuclear, is firmly at the heart of Russian attempts to build new economic alliance partners across Eurasia in the coming showdown with the United States.

US plans for ‘Nuclear Primacy’

The key to the ability of Putin’s Russia to succeed is its ability to defend its Eurasian energy strategy with a credible military deterrent, to counter now-obvious Washington military plans for what the Pentagon terms Full Spectrum Dominance.

In a revealing article titled ‘The Rise of US Nuclear Primacy,’ in the March/April 2006 Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations, authors Kier Lieber and Daryl Press made the following claim,

‘Today, for the first time in almost 50 years, the United States stands on the verge of attaining nuclear primacy. It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike. This dramatic shift in the nuclear balance of power stems from a series of improvements in the United States' nuclear systems, the precipitous decline of Russia's arsenal, and the glacial pace of modernization of China's nuclear forces. Unless Washington's policies change or Moscow and Beijing take steps to increase the size and readiness of their forces, Russia and China -- and the rest of the world -- will live in the shadow of U.S. nuclear primacy for many years to come.’

The US authors claim, accurately, that since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal has ‘sharply deteriorated.’ They also conclude that the United States is and has been for some time, intentionally pursuing global nuclear primacy. The September 2002 Bush Administration National Security Strategy explicitly stated that it was official US policy to establish global military primacy, an unsettling thought for many nations today given the recent actions of Washington since the events of September, 2001.

One of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s priority projects has been the multi-billion dollar construction of a US missile defense. It has been sold to American voters as a defense against possible terror attacks. In reality, as has been openly recognized in Moscow and Beijing, it is aimed at the only two real nuclear powers, Russia and China.

As the Foreign Affairs article points out, ‘the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one -- as an adjunct to a U.S. first-strike capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal -- if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile-defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes, because the devastated enemy would have so few warheads and decoys left.’

In the context of a United States which has actively moved the troops of its NATO partners into Afghanistan, now Lebanon, and which is clearly backing the former USSR member Georgia, today a critical factor in the Caspian Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Turkey oil pipeline, in Georgia’s move to join NATO and push Russian troops away, it is little surprise that Moscow might be just a bit uncomfortable with the American President’s promises of spreading democracy through a US-defined Greater Middle East. The invented term, Greater Middle East is the creation of various Washington think-tanks close to Cheney including his Project for the New American Century, to refer to the non-Arabic countries of Turkey, Iran, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asian (former USSR) countries, and Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. At the G-8 Summit in Summer 2004 President Bush first officially used the term to refer to the region included in Washington’s project to spread ‘democracy’ in the region.

On October 3, the Russian Foreign Ministry warned that Russia would ‘take appropriate measures’ should Poland deploy elements of the new US missile defense system. Poland is now a NATO member. Its Defense Minister, Radek Sikorski was a former Resident in Washington at Richard Perle’s hawkish AEI think-tank. He was also Executive Director of the New Atlantic Initiative, a project designed to bring the former Warsaw Pact countries of eastern Europe into NATO under the guise of spreading democracy. The United States is also building, via NATO, a European Missile Defense System.

The only conceivable target of such a system would be Russia in the sense of enabling a US first strike success. Completion of the European missile defense system, the militarization of the entire Middle East, the encirclement of Russia and of China from a connected web of new US military bases, many put up in the name of the War on Terror, all now appear to the Kremlin as part of a deliberate US strategy of Full Spectrum Dominance. The Pentagon refers to it also as ‘Escalation Dominance,’ the ability to win a war at any level of violence, including a nuclear war.

Moscow’s military status

Moscow has not been entirely passive in the face of this growing reality. In his May 2003 State of the Nation Address, Vladimir Putin spoke of strengthening and modernizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, including for Russia’s strategic forces, which will ‘ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term.’ Russia stopped withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed missiles once the Bush Administration unilaterally declared an end to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and its de facto annulling of the Start II Treaty.

Russia never stopped being a powerful entity that produced state-of-the-art military technologies -- a trend that continued from its inception as a modern state. While its army, navy and air force are in derelict conditions, the elements for Russia's resurgence as a military powerhouse are still in place. Russia has been consistently fielding top-notch military technology at various international trade shows, and has been effective in the demonstration of its capabilities.

In spite of financial and economic difficulties, Russia still produces state-of-the-art military technologies, according to a 2004 analysis by the Washington-based think tank, Power and Interest News Report (PINR). One of its best achievements after the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been its armored fighting vehicle BMP-3, which has been chosen over Western vehicles in contracts for the United Arab Emirates and Oman.

Russia's surface-to-air missile systems, the S-300, and its more powerful successor, the S-400, are reported to be more potent than American-made Patriot systems. The once-anticipated military exercise between the Patriot and the S-300 never materialized, leaving the Russian complex with an undisputed, yet unproven, claim of superiority over the American system. Continuing this list is the Kamov-50 family of military helicopters that incorporate the latest cutting-edge technologies and tactics, making them an equal force to the best Washington has. European helicopter industry sources confirm this.

In recent joint Indo-American air force exercises, where the Indian Air Force was equipped with modern Russian-made Su-30 fighters, the Indian Air Force out-maneuvered American-made F-15 planes in a majority of their engagements, prompting US Air Force General Hal Homburg to admit that Russian technology in Indian hands has given the US Air Force a ‘wake-up call.’ The Russian military establishment is continuing to design other helicopters, tanks and armored vehicles that are on par with the best that the West has to offer.

Weapons export, in addition to oil and gas, has been one of the best ways for Russia to earn much-needed hard currency. Already, Russia is the second-largest worldwide exporter of military technology after the United States. As reported in various magazines, journals and periodicals, at present, Russia's modern military technology is more likely to be exported than supplied to its own armies due to the existing financial constraints and limitations of Russia's armed forces. This has implications for America's future combat operations since practically all insurgent, guerrilla, breakaway or terrorist armed formations across the globe -- the very formations that the United States will most likely face in its future wars -- are fielded with Russian weapons or its derivatives.

Russian nuclear arsenal has played an important political role since the end of the Soviet Union, providing fundamental security for the Russian state. After a bitter intra-services fight within the Russian General Staff which lasted from 1998 to 2003, the General Staff realized along with the Defense Ministry that a further policy of neglect of nuclear forces in favor of funding rebuilding conventional forces in the face of tight budget constraints, was not tolerable. In 2003 Russia had to buy from Ukraine strategic bombers and ICBMs warehoused there. Since then strategic nuclear forces have been a priority. Today, the finances of the Russian state, thanks largely to high prices of oil and gas exports, are on a strong footing. The Russian Central Bank has become one of the five largest dollar reserve holders with reserves of more than $270 billions.

The material foundation of the Russian military is its defense industry. After 1991 the Russian Federation inherited the bulk of the Soviet defense industrial complex.

Today, with little fanfare, the US is building up its influence and military presence in the Middle East despite a general draw-down in its military commitments and expenditure. Why? Oil is certainly a large part of the answer. But in geopolitical terms, it is also to the Eurasian land power, Russia from access to the seas - just as Mackinder argued had to be done. The push for a US ‘nuclear primacy’ over Russia is the factor in world politics today which has the most potential for bringing the world into a nuclear conflagration by miscalculation.

The basic argument of the Mackinder’s geopolitics is still relevant: ‘The great geographical realities remain: land power versus sea power, heartland versus rimland, centre versus periphery...’ This Russia understands every bit as Washington.

F. William Engdahl is a Global Research Contributing Editor and author of the book, ‘A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order,’ Pluto Press Ltd. He has completed a soon-to-be published book on GMO titled, ‘Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Political Agenda Behind GMO’. He may be contacted through his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.

Yahoo Forum

2006-10-04T15:04:00.000+04:00

Anti-Georgia campaign heats up in Russia - this piece of Yahoo World News generated an emotional discussion that you can read here. My favorite posts:

- I had no idea Russia had troops in GA
- Why is the Russian Army in Atlanta?
- Russia! Out of US now!!!!!!
- Carter should've never allowed Russian troops in his home state.

Revolution and Evolution

2006-10-02T15:25:00.000+04:00

I definitely agree with Wally Shedd and with Sir Churchill that nothing better then democracy was invented to make countries stable and happy for long periods of time. Still democracy is a technology and a technical model that properly works only under certain conditions. It also means that as a technology it should be developed and adjusted depending on circumstances, standards of living, culture, social diversity, etc. This process should be regarded as adjustments but not as a “right” or “wrong” way from democracy. The only criteria to keep in mind – do such adjustments make life of people better: stable, prosperous, happy. In the long run the only criteria that separates democracy from tyranny, as Karl Popper put it, is the ability of the people to change the government without bloodshed.

What I find fundamentally wrong is the view that there is one ideal model of democracy and the task of the government is to bring the country to this ideal as close as possible. Any society is an open system that develops evolutionary and the best way to bring stability to the system is to let it develop by its own laws. Self-organization is always better then forceful intervention even with the best intentions. Even if you think that your model of government is the best in the world forcing a society into this model means a system shock and every systems responds to outside shocks by chaos. Saddam was definitely a tyrant but Saddam’s Iraq was a stable system that worked by its own laws. An ant hill might be very badly and ineffectively organized and it is possible that you know a much better model of ant hill organization. What is the best way to “reform” the ant hill? By evolution or by revolution? By destroying the old ant hill and starting building a new one from scratch? Or by introducing step-by-step improvements, working by trial and error, developing improvements that work and eliminating changes that turned out to be erroneous? I believe that even bad evolution is always better then good revolution.

It’s really surprising that even today US politics is guided by the philosophy of Enlightenment – an archaic 300-years old teaching based on the notion that human society is ruled by the same rules as nature. The first grand failure of this biological approach was first demonstrated by the consequences of the French revolution.

Das sind die Folgen der Revolution
Und ihrer fatalen Doktrine;
An Allem ist Schuld Jean Jacques Rousseau,
Voltaire und die Guillotine.
Heinrich Heine “Romanzero” 1851

I also think that Jean Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire are guilty of spreading ideas that humans are nothing but thinking ants and that there are ‘organic’ laws of social development, that this development can “progressive”, that humans have “natural” rights. But above all they are guilty of discovering “immutable laws” of social development. Karl Popper was the best philosopher who exposed such social theories as basically corrupt. He called such theories ‘historicism’. Historicism is a belief that history develops inexorably and necessarily according to some principles or rules towards a determinate end (democracy, socialism, communism, national state, etc.)

Historicists cannot make a distinction between laws and trends. First, they make an inductive mistake – pointing at a chain of certain events in the past and inventing a “law” based on the discovered trend. But the number of factors that led to a certain event was almost infinite and a social “scientist” needs beforehand a theory that would help him to pick up “right” events and dismiss all others as insignificant. Second, a social “scientist” believes that he can make predictions about future events based on the social “laws”. As Popper puts it, there can be no doubt that "the habit of confusing trends with laws, together with the intuitive observation of trends such as technical progress, inspired the central doctrines of ... historicism." (The Poverty of Historicism). Popper does not, of course, dispute the existence of trends, and he doesn’t deny that the observation of trends can be of practical value - but the essential point is that a trend is something which itself ultimately stands in need of scientific explanation, and it cannot therefore function as the frame of reference in terms of which anything else can be scientifically explained or predicted.

Karl Popper explored the failure of German Nazism and Soviet Socialism – societies that were constructed in accordance with “laws”. But I think today we should add to this list Freedom in Iraq or Democracy in Russia as another example of dogmatic and irresponsible utopian engineering.

Mission impossible

2006-09-20T19:11:00.000+04:00

When I first met Mormons and talked to them one thing really amazed me - total inability to think critically about life and deeds of Joseph Smith. Unlike many great prophets Smith didn’t live a thousand years ago and there’re tons of tangible evidence that he was a liar, a con artist and an impostor. Still so many well educated and otherwise smart people who somehow manage to block all their mental activity when it comes to discuss – how comes Smith’s translation of the Egyptian Book of Dead is complete gibberish.

We are talking about pure belief – something that is so deeply ingrained in consciousness that critical approach is almost impossible. Destruction of basic mental axioms can lead to destruction of personality. There cannot be any rational verification for religious beliefs as well as for many cultural beliefs that are close to religious.

What I find fascinating about American mentality – their notions of democracy and freedom are also ingrained. This is the case even with the most educated, sophisticated and intellectual. This is not the case with Europeans. While Brits or Frenchmen also believe in freedom and democracy they are not religious about it and don’t regard it with enthusiastic devotion. With my English friend I can freely discuss problems of democracy and our disputes are not just normal but they also help to discover something new, change to some extent our views or find compromise. With Americans it’s almost always a missionary talking to a heathen. To treat democracy as just another technical model of effective government organization and freedom as a personal feeling of limitations for self-realization is the same as trampling down on the bible. What’s the use of discussing the origins of the Book of Mormon with a faithful Mormon?

This could be just a curious cultural phenomenon if Americans were not so proactive. When your notion of freedom and democracy is so religious and you sincerely believe that your country is democratic and free then you view the world out there also religiously. You divide the world into the Forces of Good (you and your friends) and the Forces of Evil (your enemies). In-between live ignorant and uneducated heathens. You send missionaries to their jungles, educate them, give them holy books, fight with missionaries of wrong churches and get frustrated with the total stupidity of barbarians. They dare to be critical! Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormons from Egyptian. Right? He never studied Egyptian before. Right? Then how comes you don’t see that Jesus gave him the gift of understanding the language!

Kim Diagnosed At Last

2006-09-15T16:38:00.000+04:00

Thanks to my friend who happens to be a professional psychiatrist we finally managed to diagnose Kim Zigfeld - Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). If you were among those unlucky who happened to argue with La Russophobikha click here . "NPD traits discussed" is hilarious! And it is written by a person who was married to a narcissist.

The most telling thing that narcissists do is contradict themselves. They will do this virtually in the same sentence, without even stopping to take a breath. It can be trivial (e.g., about what they want for lunch) or it can be serious (e.g., about whether or not they love you). When you ask them which one they mean, they'll deny ever saying the first one, though it may literally have been only seconds since they said it -- really, how could you think they'd ever have said that? You need to have your head examined! They will contradict FACTS. They will lie to you about things that you did together. They will misquote you to yourself. If you disagree with them, they'll say you're lying, making stuff up, or are crazy. [At this point, if you're like me, you sort of panic and want to talk to anyone who will listen about what is going on: this is a healthy reaction; it's a reality check ("who's the crazy one here?"); that you're confused by the narcissist's contrariness, that you turn to another person to help you keep your bearings, that you know something is seriously wrong and worry that it might be you are all signs that you are not a narcissist].

Read more...

Kondopoga

2006-09-08T15:27:00.000+04:00

Here’s a very good example how liberastian media is covering the “racist” conflict in Kondopoga. Clair Bigg from Radio Free Europe\Radio Liberty reports;

The incident was the latest in a string of attacks against ethnic Chechens and other ethnic minorities in Kondopoga that has prompted dozens of Chechen families to flee the city.
The violence was sparked by restaurant brawl between ethnic Russians and Chechens last week that left two of the Russians dead. The restaurant, "Chaika," was owned by a Chechen man.

That’s all. There’s was a brawl that left two of the Russians dead. Nothing is said about the cause of their death. Could they have a heart attack? Quite possible. Here’s the actual chain of events. Two Russians at the restaurant “Chaika” had a brawl with the waiter who supposedly brought them cheap vodka in a bottle from expensive one. Russians refused to pay for it. The barman called the local Chechen “rescue team”. It arrived an hour later when Russians who actually started the brawl already left. About 15 Chechens armed with knives, sharpened steel bars and baseball bats rushed into the restaurant, cried, “Allahu Akbar!” and started thrashing indiscriminately everyone who was unlucky to be at the restaurant by that time. People were defending themselves with chairs and tables. In less than 5 minutes the Chechen “rescue team” killed two men and mutilated 15, eight of them were beaten within an inch of their life. Having done that Chechens left the restaurant. During the “brawl” two local police cars were staying right at the restaurant and later a third one came. Policemen didn’t interfere. Later it became known that they actually were on the rescue team’s payroll and in fact were giving protection to the bandits.

Angry mobs burned down the restaurant where the Russians were killed and destroyed a street market and several stores owned by Chechens and other people from the Caucasus.

One gets an impression that immediately after the “brawl” angry mobs started mad rampaging. In a small town like Kondopoga where people now each other the news about the “brawl” spread very quickly. People gathered after the funeral (the deceased faces were mutilated beyond recognition) on a square at the City Council bringing the following demands: (1) Bring to justice corrupt police officers, (2) Bring to justice the Chechen “rescue team” that has been terrorizing the town residents for several years already. (3) Bring to justice the owner of the restaurant (and several other businesses) that uses the Chechen “rescue team” as his personal army. Please take a note – in the first place the angered was directed at the local police that was supposed to protect residents. When the very same policemen who a day before did nothing to stop Chechens started to “disperse the unsanctioned meeting” they were attacked and on the spur of the moment about 20-30 teenagers tried to put the Chechen restaurant on fire (they did put it on fire a day later) and broke windows of the several stores. The mayor realized that things are getting out of control called Petrozavodsk riot police.

The violence has been accompanied by street rallies in Kondopoga demanding the expulsion of immigrants.
Several nationalist parties have expressed support for the riots. Some reports claim these parties actually orchestrated them.

On the next day residents of Kondopoga gathered again. This time there were about 2000 of them (6% of the total population that would equivalent to 500 000 in Moscow). Representatives of the nationalist parties together with journalists flocked to the town like carrion-crows. In the true liberastian manner journalists started interviewing nationalists from Moscow and St.Petersburg forgetting the residents of Kondopoga altogether. And – yes – nationalists claimed that they orchestrated the riots, that residents are demanding expulsion of all immigrants – all the usual PR blah blah.

"People gathered spontaneously to express their demands," Belov said. "Their demands were simple: [foreigners] get out of here, you have 24 hours. Why? You've come here without invitation and we're fed up with you. These are the two reasons behind the problems in Kondopoga and elsewhere."
Belov said representatives of his movement, know for its aggressive xenophobic rhetoric, had plans to station representatives permanently in Karelia to "help," in his words, local residents.
Ramzan Kadyrov, the prime minister of the pro-Moscow government in Chechnya, has blamed Karelian officials for failing to stop the riots and has vowed to restore order if necessary.

Yes, indeed. Kadyrov’s guys know how to restore order. No wonder the Kondopoga’s Chechens are Kadyrov's strong supporters.

Daniel McAdams on Belorus

2006-08-25T15:55:00.000+04:00

Imagine you are in Lafayette Park, across from the White House, setting up tents and loudspeakers without a permit to occupy the park with a group of several thousand protesters, guzzling beer and vodka. How long do you think it would be before the Secret Service or other uniformed local and federal officers moved in to disburse you? Five minutes?

Yet when less than one percent of the 500,000 Belarusians who voted for the political opposition were recently disbursed from October Square, one block from the presidential residence, the United States and the European Union (where member country France had been engaged in brutally beating youth protesting for more job security) announced a new round of sanctions against the country.

Aside from this absurd double standard is the fact that democracy itself is subverted in this new, revolutionary method of changing governments – all in the name of democracy, of course. Somehow in the new world of color-coded revolutions, a public display of only one percent of those who voted for the opposition – not of all voters, mind you, but just of those who voted for the opposition – is enough for the West to conclude that they represent the true will of the people. It is a new Bolshevism of the West in which a tiny minority is said to in fact be the majority. The media plays into this deception, with its breathless but highly selective reporting of such incidents. The Western media makes no effort to gain actual facts, preferring to rely on salacious but unverified tales of beatings and mass arrests made available in copious quantities by those who stand to benefit most by their dissemination.

Before going into the reasons for Alexander Lukashenko's victory, I should add a word on the outrageous lies told by the Western press before, during, and after the presidential elections in Belarus. How do I know? I was there. I was there standing in October Square on Wednesday afternoon watching the 150 or so protesters while the BBC reported "thousands." I took pictures of the beer bottles and coffee cups that littered the square as the foreign media reported that the police were not allowing any food or drink to the protesters.
On Wednesday, the Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that "they flew flags of denim" when there was not a single denim flag on the square. There were plenty of Georgian flags, however, which is strange considering the abysmal state of the "reformed" Georgian economy, where electricity and water are about as available as in Iraq. Lukashenko entered his press conference "drunk with victory," the German paper reported. I saw no such thing, but rather a politician who is not afraid to shoot back rhetorically at attacks from the U.S. administration. Accused by President Bush of selling weapons to other countries, Lukashenko retorted, "Coming from a man who has profited so much from war and oil, it is an accusation that doesn't deserve a response."

Heavy police presence, the press reported. We saw far fewer police than you would have seen at any gathering in the U.S. or any Western capitol. In fact, before authorities finally moved yesterday to disburse the makeshift tent city from the square, there was hardly a police officer to be seen. The list goes on.

Read more...

Again on democracy

2006-08-15T15:38:00.000+04:00

What really surprised me about comments on my previous post was that pro-democracy commentators were so emotional. It was like “How dare you! Democracy brings only peace and prosperity”. Actually the idea that democracy is a hopelessly flawed model of government is not original. The fact that conflict and confrontation is embedded in Western democratic model is not mine. Actually John Locke – the ideological father of American Constitution – was the first to describe it. His system of checks and balances is a proposed method to soften the confrontational nature of democracy.

Did you sleep when you had “Anti-democracy theories” class at school? Ah, I forgot. You never study anti-democracy theories at school. In the best case you heard about some “evil” theorists who deny democracy. In the West democracy became a totalitarian dogma the same way as Marxism in the Soviet Union. The difference is that at school you study democratic vision of history and politics but in the Soviet Union I studied the same subject from the Marxist point of view. You believe that the only alternative to democracy is tyranny but I was taught that the only alternative to the Soviet-type socialism is oppressive imperialism. The difference between us: you believe in myths about democracy but I didn’t believe in myths about communism.

I still cannot understand how a rational person can believe that a purely technical model of government can be a moral ideal to struggle for? From the ethical point of view democracy is neutral but “democratization” is evil. Democracy can be a working model only under very specific conditions and the most important among them is – ultra-high level of homogeneity in ethical values, culture, religion, distribution of income. The society is ready for democracy when it is very, very average. This way the tyranny of majority is not regarded as oppressive. When there’s little homogeneity democracy provokes and encourages secessionism, segregation, discrimination of minorities and ultimately civil wars. A country needs several hundred years of applying different kinds of checks and balances, development of civil society, recognition of minorities’ rights, suffrage, etc. They are all measures to push a fundamentally flawed model into a stable condition. There is also another way to make democracy work – occupy the country and kill all “anti-democrats” but still even under such conditions homogeneity is a must. Lack of homogeneity can kill even a very stable democracy. What will become to France when Muslims make 51% of voters?

Let us make a mental experiment. Imagine that the modern day American government with the help of a time machine got access to America at the beginning of the 19th century. After shaking hands with the Founding Fathers what would be the next thing for George Bush and his Marines to do? Of course, democratizing the young US by installing a modern day American model of democracy, including equal rights for women and black slaves and freedom of speech (with pornography). Would we get a civil war at this point?

For those interested in serious anti-democracy theories and alternatives to democracy I recommend “Democracy: the God that Failed” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Democracy and war

2006-08-07T19:59:00.000+04:00

Western mainstream media comments extensively on Yanukovich becoming a new PM in the Ukraine. Some commentators experience cognitive shock, “How comes? Everything was so democratic but then “the enemy of democracy” becomes a new Ukrainian PM? Is it a blow on democracy or not?” Acting in the interests of the major Western powers and being democratic has become synonymous but in reality there are almost no connections.

By democracy we mean nothing but a technical model of government that is copied from Western standards and has several variations. There’s no doubt that for citizens of the Western countries this model works perfectly. So perfectly that 99% of them sincerely believe that this model should also bring peace, prosperity and happiness to every country in the world once implemented. Cause is taken for effect here, I believe.

Theoretically Western-type democracy model looks ideal but after its evident failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Ukraine an open minded person should ask a simple question, “Maybe something is wrong not with the people of these countries but with the model itself?”

It is not hard to see that at the heart of the model of democracy lies confrontation. Conflict and conflict based competition is the essence of democracy. Elections, multi-party system, checks and balances, free press, civil society – they are all about competing, warring, struggling for power, dividing people into winners and losers, fighting for minorities rights. It all works in aggressive cultures where people prefer competition over harmony, criticism over consensus, and change over stability. How comes people of democratic cultures did not annihilate each other so far? I think it’s a result of several factors.

First, the ability to keep aggression "pacified" is a result of a thousand years of never ending wars in Europe between dozens of countries varying is size. The sheer instinct of survival “civilized” European nations and by the time first concepts of democracy were tried European wars were so “civilized” that citizens of some Crapenburg Principality didn’t even know if today they belong to France or to Prussia although the quantity of wars and conflicts never really decreased. Millennium of European never ending wars also brought up a new type of man – a person who is friendly or neutral towards occupying troops, who is ready to compromise, who values above all the life of an individual but doesn’t care much about the fate of his Crapenburg Motherland. But the most important - Europeans learnt to treat conflicts and even wars more like a game that should be kept within “civilized” rules forged over centuries. Fortunately, it all ended with an invention of weapons of mass destruction.

In countries where wars were very rare and where people could enjoy at least a hundred years of peace another type culture was molded. We are talking about India, China, Japan, and Russia. In these cultures conflicts were frowned upon, harmony was more important than competition, unity more important winning, where individual interests were less important then interests of a family, group, nation or country. In such cultures conflicts were subdued, competition highly regulated, team spirit encouraged and individualists ostracized.

Now what happens when an aggressive democratic model is installed in such countries? Let’s have a look. In Saddam times Sunni and Shia lived together in peace, marriages between Sunni and Shia were common, people didn’t even know if their neighbors are Shia or Sunni. Of course, there were small groups of radicals but they were underground. Then “democracy” comes. It was all but natural that major political parties and organizations competing for votes start profiteering on the most evident topic – religious differences. Conflict that was almost invisible before is blown out of proportion. At the same time, unlike Westerners, people in Iraq are not used to treat conflicts as a “game”. They take it very seriously. A country is divided by implacable differences – you belong either to a Sunni party or to a Shia party. What’s more – the so-called system of checks and balances leaves no hopes to resolve the conflict peacefully. We get a civil war but what is the real reason of the civil war – religious differences or a model of democracy that encourages confrontation? More then that – countries that achieved some harmony are strongly criticized by democracy pundits for lack of conflicts and fights.

There are hundreds of examples when a Western type model of democracy gave rise to civil wars. American model was probably the worst although Americans try really hard to implement it all around the globe. Take Latin America, for example. In the 19th century it took only a year or two for a Latin American country to adopt American type “democracy” and a new civil war between “Democrats” and “Republicans” started.

People in your country live in peace and harmony? Then we need to finance some NGO’s that will teach you democracy. “Orange revolution” in the Ukraine is a good example. Wonder why only 15 years ago conflict between Ukrainian-speaking citizens of Ukraine and Russian-speaking Ukrainian was almost non-existent? Why differences between Northern and Southern clans in Kirgizia were so meager?

PS. “Democracy” in countries like India or Japan is very far away from the Western model. Japan managed to live fifty years with a one-party parliament, symbolic checks and balances system, incredible lack of any political dissent on TV and in newspapers. Things are not better in India.

Tolstoy and Qana

2006-08-03T15:40:00.000+04:00

Leo Tolstoy’s religious and political beliefs he adopted at the end of his life are often simply dismissed or viewed as wacky. Old man went gaga. But then when I read again and again about justification of war in Lebanon or about the viciousness of Qana bombing, I believe we need to recall who Tolstoy said about war and morality.

Morality is something that belongs to an individual alone. An individual has an immortal soul and should seek salvation. Any group or nation cannot be moral or immoral. Such terms are simply not applicable. Groups or nations are not led by moral values but individuals do. What we see today in Lebanon is sheer fight for survival. According to Tolstoy no violence could be justifiable for an individual. The pilot who dropped a bomb on Qana lost his immortal soul immediately as it killed children. Or condemned himself to burn in hell. Or chose the destiny to become a roach in his next life. I prefer the latter option for purely aesthetical reasons. To put it short – he sacrificed his soul in order to save his tribe. Exactly what all animals do. If species A endangers the existence of species B, species A is “justified” to start the war, especially when it is stronger, has bigger fangs and better support from other animals. Survival of biological species belongs to the realm of instincts not morality and values.

The pilot who dropped bombs on Qana would probably be given many shiny medals, money, respect, etc. but he is doomed. When he dies the greatest praise for him would be then his widow would tell his kids, “Don’t step on this roach. It’s possibly our dad who saved our country from enemies”.

Click here to read Tolstoy’s “The Kingdom of God is Within You” on Wikisource.

"Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul;but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell."--MATT. x. 28.

Руссофобиха жжот

2006-07-31T18:20:00.000+04:00

La Russophobe, being even more indefatigable and prolific then ever, took a great liking to my blog. Here's one of her comments that I found especially amusing:

My blog contains hundreds of comments and has had thousands of visits in its short existence, making it one of the most trafficked Russia speciality blogs in the world. You are a classic Russophile piece of dirt, telling outrageous lies totally detached from the facts. Lies like yours are exactly what has brought Russia to its knees. I suggest you check the lead post on the blog, top ten reasons to hate Russia, which contains more than three dozen comments. To read it, CLICK HEREInstead of dealing with my comments in this post, you make a personal attack upon me. Typical attitude of a failed, dishonest Neo-Soviet propagandist, and clear proof of just how good my blog is. You can't handle the important facts it uniquely reports, so you launch a pathetic personal attack.What's more, you obviously haven't read my blog at all, since it clearly states that its purpose is NOT to attract comments but to DOCUMENT the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union. Unlike this blog, only people who are members of BLOGGER can write on La Russophobe. There's a quote at the top of my blog that you ought to read: Vincent Van Gogh sold only one painting in his whole life. I guess to a disgusting little toad like you, that makes him a failure. La Russophobe doesn't think so, nor does the world.For you information (as if you cared about facts) my article about racism in Russia recently appeared on Publius Pundit CLICK HERE TO READ IT where it also generated a large number of comments. My blog is widely linked and generates more than 10,000 Google hits.

Sitemeter at the LR blog registered 6300 visitors in four months. What happened to 3700 Google hits? Did they miss the target?

Seems like I'm not the only one who thinks that Kim F. needs some serious medical help. Here's a comment from Anonymous:

You might not really help LR (and us) further by reacting the way you did to her. She just craves for attention, or rather reaction, as you noticed, like some kids use provocation and wait to get a punishment from their parents to get their love and attention. LR only needs some medical help, and some comforting words from us: "Now, now, we understand your point, and you are right in all of your comments. Some people might not show you how much they appreciate you, but they are just fools. Everything is alright. Do not worry, we will always agree with you. You are very important to all of us."

Can anyone tell me - does a typical American insurance covers costs of Prozac?

A Liberal Guide to Better Understanding Freedom Fighters

2006-07-28T18:02:00.000+04:00

My previous post "Excusable Terrorism" generated some comment. Pietari posted a real masterpiece. I think it shouldn't be wasted in the comments section so I re-post it here.

A Liberal Guide to Better Understanding Freedom Fighters

At this very moment it is too early to know the precise number of hostage takers killed or captured. In any case, it is important to keep some simple liberal rules in mind just in case one or more freedom fighters survived the attacks by the Russian police and were taken into custody:

1. We may not condone their killings - if there were any at all -, but we have to look for the root causes for a better understanding of their behavior. Were they inconvenienced in practicing their religion? Delays during rush hour in Chechnya? Election losses? Only if we know exactly what drove these young men and women to their somewhat regrettable actions can we make a final judgment.

2. Avoid the term "terrorists" for the hostage takers by all means. They have families with mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, and it would be a great disservice for them to have their relatives labeled with derogative terms.

3. The hostage takers have full rights for proper legal procedure. They should be assigned the best lawyers available, preferably from France or Germany. Both countries have a proud tradition of setting proven terrorists free, either as a result of faulty court hearings or by giving in to blackmail.

4. It must be investigated in full detail if Putin is behind the hostage taking. He has every interest in the world to appear as a hardliner, and he desperately needed another victory over Chechnyan freedom fighters. While this is only a non-confirmed hypothesis so far, we have not heard any rejection of it from official Russian government sources - which is quite telling in itself, of course.

5. There can be no - repeat: NO - capital punishment for the hostage takers. Capital punishment is a cruel and inhuman act that violates the human rights of the accused.

6. We request that an internationally reputable organization such as the Red Cross be permitted to monitor conditions and report cases of abuse and torture in the prison where the hostage takers are held.

7. Free flow of information between the imprisoned hostage takers and their peers from Al Qaida must be permitted at all times. Access to telecommunications and the internet must be guaranteed.

The search for a political solution of the conflict is imperative. Meetings between representatives of the Russian government and the hostage takers, under the supervision of the United Nations, are the only way out of the crisis.

The cycle of violence has got to stop! We will keep you posted on any human rights violations by the Russian government. The hostage takers deserve a fair and transparent legal procedure.

You may throw up now...

Excusable terrorism

2006-07-26T17:45:00.000+04:00

I found this editorial from Boston Globe only yesterday. On July, 11, 2006 the editor of the newspaper commented on the death of Shamil Basayev. I think it’s a good example of how lies, distortions and double standards come together. After Beslan it became really difficult for mainstream newspapers to write about Basayev and other freedom fighters in Chechnya. The BG editor wriggles but still the point is evident – there are bad terrorists and there are excusable terrorists depending on whom they fight. One line from the editorial:

There can be no excuse and no justification for Basayev's targeting of innocent civilians. But Putin's re conquest of Chechnya has been no less vicious to innocent civilians.

That’s right. There can be no excuses and also no justifications for “buts”. When you use “buts” you mean that the previous sentence is simply a ritual. If there were less “buts” in helping bin Laden fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan there would’ve been less surprises why this “friend of America” hates America so much. For people like Basayev or bin Laden there could be no friends among infidels – only idiots who support them politically, with money, or with weapons and who are spared for the time being.
The Boston Globe editorial tells the usual Chechnya story – Basayev was a good freedom fighter but then Russians were so bad that he had no choice but to become a terrorist and start killing Osetian schoolchildren.
Here’s a phrase about the first Chechnya war:

In that war, Basayev took part in the defense of the Chechen capital, Grozny. Journalists saw no traces of the remorseless savagery or the Islamist fanaticism that were to characterize his behavior in later years.

The editor forgot about Budenovsk that happened in 1995 when Basayev took a hundred pregnant women hostages but the editor is not lying. In fact “journalists saw no traces of the remorseless savagery” in Budenovsk. In 1995 I saw live report from Budenovsk on CNN. Then I, like most of Russians, believed that Western journalists are unbiased. What I saw was a shameless show of hypocrisy. An anorexic blonde about 25 years old is reporting live, “We see women in windows of the hospital, Chechen gunmen are shooting, Russian soldiers taking positions. I only hope that Russians don’t start shooting at women but Russians are known for their savagery”. I gasped. Basayev’s gunmen are using pregnant women as human shields but the blonde is worrying about Russian savagery. She goes on, “Kremlin calls this a terrorist attack but let’s listen to the other side.” Then goes a long interview with Basayev. Then an interview with a hostage – the woman tries to smile and says, “Chechens are very friendly, they give us food and water, they told us about their fight and now I truly believe that they only want freedom and all of us – there are about hundred Russian women here – support Chechnya independence and ask the government to stop the war”. And the blonde again, “What looks like a terrorist attack was actually a desperate act of Chechen rebels to gain freedom and now even Russians support them.” Probably even the CNN editors thought that the blonde’s report was a bit over the top because I never saw her again reporting from Chechnya.

Now back to the editorial:
He (Basayev) was a Chechen nationalist then and, like most Chechens, practiced a temperate, traditional form of Islam. He even ran in Chechnya's 1996 presidential election, losing to the moderate Aslan Maskhadov, whom he then served as prime minister for six months. That was a tragically brief era of independence, moderation, and democracy for Chechnya.

During this “tragically brief era of moderation” Chechnya was run by cave-age Sharia laws, there were at least two open slave markets, trading hostages became the biggest Chechnya industry, the country was ruled by warlords and Islamists. In fact the “moderation” was so high that every human rights organization or NGO left Chechnya for security reasons. They all came back in 1999 when the second war started. Under protection of Russian arms human rights defenders started doing what? Right – documenting Russian soldiers’ crimes that protected them from freedom-loving Chechnya gunmen. Not a single Western NGO in Chechnya did publish a single report on slave trading or hostage taking.

By 1999, when Basayev led a disastrous raid into neighboring Dagestan -- which Russia seized upon as the rationale for its second invasion of Chechnya -- Basayev had grown a long beard, come under the influence of the rabid Arab Islamist known as Ibn al-Khattab, and plunged into the terrorist maelstrom of beheadings, kidnappings, and hostage-taking.

The Boston Globe editor lies here – Basayev invaded Dagestan already with Khattab, already with a long beard and “the maelstrom of beheadings, kidnappings, and hostage-taking” started long before the invasion. When we cannot tell what is the cause and what is the effect, we would hardly understand the bin Laden syndrome.

Kasparov's Russia

2006-07-14T12:01:00.000+04:00

Garry Kasparov is a Russian version of Bobby Fisher but unlike Bobby who can only publish his bizarre ideas on eccentric internet sites only Garry enjoys full access to major mainstream American newspapers. In an article called “What’s bad for Putin is best for Russian” in New York Times he writes about Bush:

Now this American president seems to be saying that Iraqis and Afghans are deserving of democracy, but Russians are not.

You get it right. Garry Kasparov is a strong supporter of bombing Russia into democracy. He sees it as the only chance for Russians to become free, like Germans and Japanese became free and democratic after WW2. In “Karamozov Brothers” there’s one hideous character Smerdiakov who has exactly the same idea, “What’s wrong about it, sir? A smart nation conquers a stupid nation, sir”.

The article is actually about “The Other Russia” forum that Kasparov held a week or so ago. Western media pictured it as a “democratic” challenge to Putin. Few mentioned the fact that at this forum Kasparov gathered almost all extremists both left and right. Like, Limonov’s National Bolsheviks (their flag is an exact copy of Hitler’s banner only swastika in the center is replaced by black hammer and sickle) and Anpilov’s Working Russia – an ultra Stalinist organization that promises to hang millions of “democrats” on every tree in Russia if only it gets to power. Even Miss Novodvorskaya – mentally challenged “freedom” bigot – refused to join Kasparov. On the other hand the British Ambassador and two guys for the US State Department saw nothing wrong to sit at one table with Nazis and Stalinists. If one follows the perverse logic of Western mainstream media Putin had to support this forum. Isn’t he the one who loves Stalin and encourages racist attacks?

Another funny passage from Kasparov’s article:
Just days ago, dozens of activists en route to Moscow to attend the conference were arrested, some beaten.

The above mentioned activists (not dozens – there were twenty of them) are members of AKM – Avant-garde of Communist Youth. They were beaten by the train passengers who got sick and tired of their shouting for hours, “Stalin is our hero. Putin is haemorrhoids”. (Сталин наш герой, Путин геморрой). Police actually had to defend the drunk teens.

Twisting facts

2006-06-27T16:33:00.000+04:00

Kenneth Rogoff is Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard University, and was formerly chief economist at the IMF. He wrote an article for Project Syndicate titled Russia’s Skeptical G8 Partners. Here’s a example of the professor’s economic professionalism:

Why wasn’t Chinese president Hu Jintao, whose country’s economy is the world’s second largest (when measured at world prices), given a seat at the table instead of Putin? After all, even with all its energy resources, and even with today’s sky-high oil and gas prices, Russia’s national income is only about the size of Greater Los Angeles

Prof. Rogoff takes China’s GDP measured in purchasing power parity dollars and compares it to Russia. Well, prices on goods and services in China are definitely many times lower then in Russia or in America (one only needs to visit Walmart). Then he takes Russia’s GDP measured in official exchange rate dollars and compares it to Greater Los Angeles. But even here Prof. Rogoff is twisting facts. Official exchange rate GDP of Russia is $740 billion but GDP of Greater LA is $500 billion. Are 740 and 500 "comparable"?! I envy Prof. Rogoff's students - it must be a cakewalk writing term papers in his class.

http://www.lawa.org/news/newsDisplay.cfm?newsID=91
Citing data provided by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), the study projects a Greater Los Angeles area population of more than 21 million people, a work force of 9.9 million men and women, and a gross domestic product of more than $600 billion by the year 2015. Today’s figures are 15 million people, 6.87 million employed, and $500 billion GDP.

IMHO even by 2015 Greater LA's GDP will be uncomparable with current GDP of Russia.

Now I have a great counter-argument for Prof. Rogoff. After all, even being the greatest power in the world the US GDP per capita is at the level of US$ 41 800 while a god forgotten, permafrost bound region of Ymalo-Nenetsk in Siberia boasts US$ 52 000 GDP per capita.

For your information – some facts from CIA Factbook:

China
GDP (purchasing power parity):
$8.859 trillion (2005 est.)
GDP (official exchange rate):
$2.225 trillion (2005 est.)
GDP - real growth rate:
9.9% (official data) (2005 est.)
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$6,800 (2005 est.)

Russia
GDP (purchasing power parity):
$1.589 trillion (2005 est.)
GDP (official exchange rate):
$740.7 billion (2005 est.)
GDP - real growth rate:
6.4% (2005 est.)
GDP - per capita (PPP):
$11,100 (2005 est.)

Oil Addiction

2006-06-26T11:59:00.000+04:00

A week ago USA Today published an editorial titled “Oil Addiction”. The author laments that oil addiction makes US government too soft of dictatorial and tyrannical regimes. Of course, Russia is included as an example of an oil rich dictatorship. In truly Puritanical tradition the author appeals to the superiority of moral values over materialistic needs such as consuming energy. I doubt that if America refuses to buy oil from dictators, such as Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran, etc. its citizens rejoice and stop driving SUVs, using air-conditioning and start paying triple utility bills. The author writes:

Much of the problem is driven by the USA, which accounts for a quarter of the world's oil consumption. There are no easy solutions. Increased gas taxes are a tough sell. Domestic drilling is inadequate to the task. And practical alternatives to oil might or might not materialize. But as unappealing as these may be, ignoring troubling world developments is worse.

One place to start is to recognize that the central question is not what we should pay for energy but how we should pay for it. If we can begin to shift the hidden costs away from the taxpayers and onto energy consumers, the true nature of our addiction will be more visible.

Somehow US Today editors and many other dictatorships’ watchers forget about the other side of the problem with high oil prices. Very high oil prices – or better said constantly increasing oil prices – are beneficial for contemporary American economic policies. Oil trade in the world is done in American dollars – green pieces of paper printed in the US. Since March 2006 the world doesn’t even know how much green paper America currently prints. But as long as increased amount of green paper is happily consumed by international oil traders due to increasing oil prices, everything is ok. America can afford its tremendous budget deficit not fearing inflation.

There’s a traditional scary story for Russia – your economy will collapse when oil prices go down. Probably it’s true. But low oil prices will also make a lot of American green paper useless – it will flood back to its native land. Is America ready to live with huge budget proficit? Is it ready to live with double digit inflation? Ironically the financial crisis could also solve the problem of oil addiction – unemployed don’t drive SUVs even if gas is very cheap.

Circles of Hate

2006-06-21T11:00:00.000+04:00

Kirill Pankratov wrote a review of Gary Shteyngart’s book “Absurdistan” in eXile. Here are some of his thoughts about peculiarities of American hate that I fully support:

There is a strict differentiation in the American media and cultural space con-cerningz whom you can hate or despise and how. One must be very careful with anybody non-white, of course. Blacks are strictly off-limits. Asians are too, for the most part. You can't say anything truly bad about Jews (you can criticize Israel's policies as much as you'd like to, but you risk being labeled an anti-Semite). You can make fun of Germans, but they are so neutered and inoffensive these days it's like making fun of pigeons. It is pretty safe to hate and mock French. But then again, how much can you milk tired jokes about "surrender monkeys" and rude garcons in Parisian restaurants?

But it is totally permissible to hate and despise Russians. It is as if a huge sign is flashing over the media landscape: "Here you may shit as much as you want!" There is a very small number of roles that Russians can play in American popular art vicious mafia thugs and their molls, obnoxious fat apparatchiks, half-starving babushkas, raving alcoholics, pitiful girls exploited for sex trade, or the occasional brave pro-Western dissident or a spy. Any kind of "normalcy" is simply forbidden. There are a few objective reasons for that:

1) During many decades of the Cold War the West conditioned its own plebs to hate and dehumanize the "savage Russian enemy," so this line produces automatic brand-recognition and little mental resistance; there is no "Russian lobby" in the US, but many ethnic anti-Russian lobbies (e.g. Ukrainian, East-European, Jewish, Baltic) were nurtured for decades;

2) Russians are essentially white Europeans (even if alluded to as "Asiatic despotism" on a proper occasion), so hating and despising them is safe from the dreaded "racism" label;

3) Russians are not known for mobs rampaging through streets because of some prophet caricatures published in an obscure newspaper, nor they likely to issue fatwas to kill offending authors, or actually cut their throats; so it is safe in a cowardly way.

It was a real shock to meet several people who were extremely tactful and delicate when talking about evident cases of black racism but at the same time feel absolutely free to make spiteful and malicious generalizations about Russian ‘chicks’ or Russian “rudeness”. And they knew that I am Russian and that I am insulted by such remarks. Nobody knows how much hate brawls in souls of always friendly smiling PC talking people. В тихом омуте черти водятся.

Curious statistics

2006-05-31T18:40:00.000+04:00

Causes of death per 100 thousand of population from 1980 till 2005.

Green – accidental alcohol poisoning
Red – homicides
Yellow – suicides
Blue – road accidents

The essence of Russia

2006-05-30T00:15:00.000+04:00

This is a real gem. I don't know how much time it took Robert to write this wonderful column but he caught the the very essence of Russia. Copied and pasted from Moscow News "Is Chaos Key to Russian Soul?" by Robert Bridge:

It was during a walk through my American hometown with a friend from Moscow when I first felt the wide chasm separating the Russian and Western mentalities. During our suburban stroll, we came upon an old vacant house that had been up for sale for months. The owner had died and apparently there was nobody in the family to take care of the property. The lawn looked more like a wheat field, with crazy weeds and wild flowers sprouting up in strange places.

I was just about to explain why the property was such a mess when my Russian friend exclaimed, "You know, this is my favorite yard in the neighborhood."

I started to laugh until I realized that my friend was absolutely serious.

How strange, I thought. While the other houses boasted finely manicured lawns, with grass so perfect you could practice your golf putt, this uncultivated jungle - complete with mouse holes and a beehive - got the best reviews.

About a month later, the house was sold. No sooner had the moving vans departed then the landscapers pulled up to the curb. The lawn was de-weeded, sprayed with chemicals, and given a military-style crew cut. The diehard dandelions - the archenemy of every American gardener - had all been vaporized. The hedges were trimmed into perfect squares and rich black mulch was spread underneath them to give an accurate border at the grass line. To the dismay of my Russian friend, the verdant vegetation had been transformed into an immaculate American yard, complete with the Stars and Stripes fluttering from the freshly painted porch.

I will always remember my Russian friend's opinion of that overgrown lawn, which became for me a metaphor for Russia itself: On the surface, it may seem cluttered, disorganized, haphazard, and perhaps even a little bit dangerous. After all, even weeds are considered flowers in Russia, and in the summertime children wear tediously woven diadems of dandelions.

"Even if I do not believe in the divine order of things" exclaimed a Dostoevsky character, "the sticky young leaves emerging from their buds in the spring are dear to my heart; so is the blue sky and so are some human beings..."

My first impression of Russia was one of unbridled spontaneity, a soft anarchy of sorts, where rules and regulations seem to take a backseat (without a seatbelt) to the human spirit. This will come as a bit of a shock - if not a breath of fresh air - to many westerners.

The culture shock is immediately apparent on the wild drive from Sheremetyevo airport. The drivers all seem to have studied from different driving manuals and the only reason for the presence of the road police, as far as I could tell, is to pull over the foreign sports cars.

But even on Russian roads, there is an underlying order to the chaos that the western mentality can barely perceive. The drivers in Russia, for example, cut each other off with a brazen disregard that would explode into road rage on American highways. Russian drivers heed the maxim, "nature abhors a vacuum." In other words, if there is an opening, the Russian driver will fill it, be that on a sidewalk or wherever. Yet, fastening your seatbelt is considered an insult to the driver.

And then there are the notorious Russian queues, a phenomenon that deserves serious anthropological study.

In America, when you go to the doctor's office, for example, you take a number and have a seat in the waiting room. When your number is called, the doctor will see you. Pretty straightforward. In Russia, you walk into a riot, ask who is last, and tell that person to hold your spot and then go shopping or something. You return about an hour later and hop back into line like nothing happened. This drives Westerners nuts. Then (then!), while all this is happening, or not happening, people are attacking the gates from other directions, with all kind of plausible and not so plausible explanations.

Yet, in the midst of this chaos, it seems the Russians truly enjoy the lively debate, the human friction, the feeling of being on the edge of god knows what.

Across the Russian capital, the sound of lawnmowers and the smell of cut grass are becoming more common. Grass is sprouting up everywhere. A woman I know even replaced her lush garden at the dacha with grass seed.

Yes, the weed whacker of Western rationalization is slowly making headway against Russian impulsiveness; I just hope it does not supplant what makes Russia so unique.

More on Cold War 2

2006-05-25T11:45:00.000+04:00

I already wrote how Dick “Sharpshooter” Cheney gave Russia a very powerful signal – what it should really do to become democratic. Mark Ames has an excellent article (one of his best, I think) on the very same topic “How Dick Cheney Got His Cold War On: A Cold War Timetable” published in eXile.

Cheney's speech raised a lot of questions and a lot of debate, but no one asked one of the most obvious questions of all: Why did Cheney choose to flaunt his hypocrisy in everyone's faces? Why not try faking it, the way most Western leaders operate when they mix righteous words with rapacious policies? Why didn't Cheney choose to put a bit of space in between his speech attacking Russia's record on democracy and his visits to the despotic Central Asian states?
Or put another way, what if it wasn't a mistake. What if the blatant, insane hypocrisy WAS the real message...and always has been all along?

So it was a huge risk for Putin to cozy up so closely to America post-9/11. He went out on a limb, made a bold move against his own powerful base, in the hope that the benefits of a mutually-supportive relationship with America would in the end prove him right and make him, and Russia, stronger.And at first it looked like he might be right, as America was undergoing Pootimania.
But then America won the war in Afghanistan much more easily and quickly than we or anyone else thought. And that war victory went to our heads. Suddenly, we decided we didn't need Putin's help anymore. In fact, as the Newsweeks triumphantly declared, we didn't need anyone's help anymore. America was not just a superpower, it was a hyperpower, perhaps the most powerful (and benign) empire that the world had ever seen.

On December 13th, 2001 after it was clear that Afghanistan had fallen to our allies Bush announced that America was unilaterally withdrawing from the ABM Treaty.
Putin went on national television, clearly stunned and weakened, calling Bush's move a "mistake." It was a painful broadcast, egg dripping from his face. I've never seen Putin so clearly bitch-slapped before or since.

I remember being shocked at what assholes we'd turned out to be. I couldn't understand why Bush didn't wait even, say, two or three months, at least for the victory dancing to settle down in Afghanistan, maybe throw Russia a bone or two. What was behind the timing?

I contacted a good friend of mine in the Defense Department to ask him why we chose to withdraw from the ABM treaty in such a time and manner as to maximally embarrass Putin for having sided with us. Why didn't we wait?

My DoD friend seemed surprised. "We didn't even consider the effect on Putin," he answered. "We only considered what's in our own interest, which is to withdraw now. Besides, we got rid of the Taliban, that was a favor enough for the Russians in our opinion." At the time, Russian anger over Bush's decision to start building a missile shield was dismissed as old Russian paranoia, a holdover of Cold War thinking. Russia had "nothing to worry about," we said.

Democracy isn't about voting. It's about serving America's interests. And serving America's interests is more tightly defined a serving the interests of the oil oligarchs in Houston, where Cheney spent the previous ten years. In fact, it's even more simple than that it's personal. America's interests are Cheney's interests. Il est l'etat. In that sense, Putin is indeed a genuine menace. And that's what makes this Cold War so different. Whereas the last one was a mortal struggle over two different systems, this is a struggle between two short, balding, bloodless men, and the oil other people's oil that made them as powerful as they are today.

Read more…

Desiphering Putin

2006-05-23T23:20:00.000+04:00

Another mysterious Putin’s joke nobody could decipher. A year ago when talking about Polish president Kwasnevki – who said, “Russia without Ukraine is better than Russia with Ukraine” – Putin said, “Think about home! About home!” I thought about this joke when I read a comment from Owen, who believes that Comrade Wolf must be America – what else?!

Here’s the joke. Vova comes back home from school and says, “Mommy! I wrote a four letter word on our fence!” Mother, “Vova, how dare you?! It’s so rude! Who taught you such words! I hate four letter words! It’s so disgusting! You’re only 10 years old! My parents never used four letter words! I was 21 when I heard such words for the first time in my life. Blah-blah-blah!” The boorish dad who was listening to the rant for ten minutes says, “Think about HOME, darling.”

The proof of pudding

2006-05-23T16:48:00.000+04:00

The proof of pudding is in its eating. The proof of real freedom of press is in the level of knowledge readers have. No matter how much “democrats” yell that in the West the press is absolutely free, it takes only one conversation with a person who regularly reads what Western media writes about Russian politics to realize – the person knowledge is either outright wrong or very distorted. Take, for example, Owen who posted a comment on my blog. Owen writes:

I think that making a law kicking out foreign NGOs and disallowing foreign money is a pretty good step towards tightening down on a country's civil society.

How did she/he come to such ludicrous conclusions? Didn’t “free and unbiased” press write about it?
The law was about making NGO (not only foreign NGOs but all of them) activities transparent. It means stating where your money comes from and on what exactly projects you spend the money. What kind of activities should a foreign NGO lead that the possibility of openly and honestly answering the question, “Who gives you money?” is regarded as “kicking out” of the country. I bet Owen would never find a single newspaper article in the “free” press that simply stated these facts.

Another good example of “free” press objectivity is covering Russian-Ukrainian natural gas conflict. I bet nobody gives me a single link to any article from any “respectable” Western news source that mentioned the following facts:

- Since 1996 Russia stopped supplying natural gas to Ukraine SIX times. Reasons? Bad debts and gas theft. The usual period of no supply was 2-4 days. Ukraine was wriggling but paying. Also it never siphoned off European gas from its pipes. “Free” Western press wasn’t even noticing those conflicts. The last conflict was different because Ukraine started stealing European gas. In the absurd world of “free” press Russia was accused as an unreliable partner and as a blackmailer.
- Ukraine asked Russia to introduce market prices on gas not the other way round.
- Negotiations with Ukraine started in March and first Russia asked for the price 130 (to be bargained down).
- Ukraine sabotaged negotiations. Putin, Medvedev and Miller told about it many times but “free” press didn’t hear them. E.g. Gazprom delegation could come to Ukraine for a PLANNED round of negotiations just to find out that NOT A SINGLE high ranking official is in Kiev by the time – too busy. Gazprom was asked to talk with interns.
- Ukraine passed the 2006 budget based on $65 per 1000 m3 prices. When Gazprom said, “Hey! We didn’t agree on that price!” Ukraine immediately started a PR campaign – “Evil Russia uses gas as a political weapon! It revenges for Orange Revolution!”. I call this “OJ Simpson tactics.”
- And at this point the “well covered” scandal began. Ukraine says, “We have the budget and we won’t change it. Agree to $65 – you have no other choice”. Gazprom, “Our price is $130. This is a subsidized price as Europeans pay $230 for the very same gas.” Ukraine, “Ok, ok. $70 and this is our final proposal. Take it or leave it.” Gazprom, “We will stop gas supply.” Ukraine, “You won’t dare. We’re pro-Western now. Europe and America will punish you if you doing that.” Gazprom (really mad), “Ok. Our previous proposal is nil. If you don’t want privileged price then you should pay market price. $230, that is”. Ukraine, “Bloody murder! Blackmail! Intimidation! Imperialistic pigs! Mr Bush, please defend us from the tyrant!”
- January 1, 2006. Gazprom stopped supplying gas to Ukraine. Ukraine did what it never did before – it started stealing European gas.

Delirium of the day

2006-05-18T17:23:00.000+04:00

It seems like Washington Times editors run out of sane persons to write op-ed on Russian politics. I cannot think of any rational reasons for publishing “Standing up to Russia” by Tsotne Bakuria. Below are some most interesting passages from his article:

They (Russian leaders) dream of restoring the Soviet Union to all its crumbling, dysfunctional glory. They dream of seeing the United States under a red flag (seriously). Communism is a latent virus in Eastern Europe, but forces are bent on seeing it become active again.

I grew up under communism and its harsh, vicelike grip on my country. Drinking Coca-Cola was prohibited.

KGB forced us to drink Pepsi.

Watching Hollywood movies might land you 12 years in a Siberian gulag.

On the other hand selling videos with Swedish hard porn could get you maximum 5 years in an ordinary prison.

Reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn? You might as well drink arsenic the next morning and get it over with.

I personally run out of arsenic when I was reading Solzhenitsyn with my friends. That’s why I’m still alive.

A schoolmate of mine showed up one day in a pair of new Nike sneakers. For the next three weeks, he was mysteriously absent from school. The local police took him in for days of questioning.

Soviets were fighting competitors of Adidas (that was produced in Leningrad), you know.

Torturing journalists. Killing opposition voices. I remember listening to the Soviet-scrambled Voice of America in a musty, dank basement, afraid we would go to jail. Cars stopping in the night; KGB officers in black leather coats branding Kalashnikovs, taking innocent people away in the dark.

Those KGB officers also wore chains, high heel boots, runes tattooed on their foreheads. They also spoke with heavy American accent. Almost forgot – watching those KGB officers might land you 12 years in a Siberian gulag.

Do gambling-crazed, oil-rich, nightclub hopping Russian citizens really yearn for their ignoble past?

Tsotne Bakuria is a former member of the Georgian Parliament and visiting scholar at George Washington University. George Washington University is definitely in a very poor state. How can anyone explain why they recruit scholars at mental asylums?

Sovereign Democracy

2006-05-17T17:16:00.000+04:00

Vasiliy Ivanov from Izvestia newspaper read transcripts of Cheney’s “New Cold War” Vilnius speech. He found a very interesting phrase “Vision we affirm today is of a community of sovereign democracies [...]". Hold on! But the phrase ‘sovereign democracy’ was re-invented by Putin just a couple of years ago. He meant democracy that is being developed by the people, whom this democracy serves, not by outsiders who know better what model of democratic institutions fits best for the particular country. Putin also hinted that countries, like Estonia or Georgia “built” their democracies simply copying word by word what they were told to do, either by EU or America. We are building are democracy ourselves, making a lot of mistakes, stumbling, doing two steps forward and one step back, but this democracy is ours to its root not a thoughtless copy of some “standard” that cannot even theoretically exist.

The fact that Cheney uses Putin’s phrase is ironic. This very phrase ‘sovereign democracy’ made Russian liberal democrats and US-sponsored NGO’s simply mad. For example, Nemtsov said that if there’s any attribute before the word ‘democracy’ then it’s not democracy but dictatorship. Carnegie Endowment in Russia was thundering that the idea of ‘sovereign democracy’ is dead for a hundred years already. One liberal from Novaya Gazeta even further – democracy today could not be sovereign because the Civilized Democratic International Community decides what is democratic and ‘sovereign’ countries should obey.

If there're no enemies they have to be invented

2006-05-16T15:29:00.000+04:00

I thought Washington Post and NYT are outlandish when it comes to Russian politics. Well, in comparison with second pier American newspapers they should be called beacons of objectivity. Here's an editorial from Miami Herald (aka Sochinskaya Zvezda) called "Russia under Putin reverts to old habitsOUR OPINION: BLAME FOR ICY RELATIONS RESTS WITH RUSSIAN LEADER".

It has seemed like old times lately, what with the United States and Russia taking potshots at each other like the Cold War adversaries they once were. No one welcomes a return to that era, but let's put the blame squarely where it belongs -- on the shoulders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his state of the union speech this week, Mr. Putin lashed out at the United States for criticism over his human-rights record. Instead of denying it, he adopted the ''so's your old man'' defense by claiming the United States is in no position to criticize anyone on this topic.

Delirium! Putin didn’t even mention the US in his speech. Calling his sarcastic remark about ‘comrade wolf’ who knows whom to it “lashing out” is not just over-reaction. It’s clinical paranoia.

NY Secrets of Birth Rate Boost

2006-05-12T13:52:00.000+04:00

New York Times (aka NY Komsomolets) published today an incredibly insightful editorial “Mr. Putin's State of the Union”. Here’s the most interesting part of it:

After the Soviet Union collapsed, some hoped that freedom would encourage Russians to multiply, but the dislocation and insecurity of the era have had the opposite effect. So the Russian population continues to dwindle, at the rate of 700,000 a year.

Mr. Putin proposes to address the problem with a wide range of subsidies and financial incentives, along with improved health care, a crackdown on illicit alcohol, improved road safety and the like. These are all useful goals, but they've been tried before, to no avail.

Perhaps another approach would be to see whether the population could be increased through improved democratic institutions. If corruption and greed among the elite were curbed somewhat, and if Mr. Putin started worrying less about throwing Russia's weight around and more about allowing a greater part of the population to share in the country's governance, riches, debates and dreams, maybe the drinking and poverty would give way to larger families. There's no guarantee, of course, but unlike the measures Mr. Putin outlined, this approach has never been fully explored.

Right! Nothing encourages unprotected sex and sobriety more than participating in elections or taking part in a democratic rally. Especially when it is hosted by Ms. Novodvorskaya. Did Mr. Editor offered this piece of advice to European nations? Seems like Albania was the only country that listened to him.

Comrade Wolf

2006-05-11T17:15:00.000+04:00

Some information for those who are mystified by Putin’s “Comrade Wolf” metaphor. Comrade Wolf comes from an old Soviet joke.

Rabinovich and his pet sheep are walking in the woods. Suddenly they fall into a deep pit. A minute later a wolf also falls into the same pit. The scared sheep starts bleating. “What do you mean – baa, baa, baa?” – says Rabinovich, “Comrade Wolf knows whom to eat”.

Dick Shot Kremlin

2006-05-09T22:22:00.000+04:00

Dick Chaney came to Vilnius and made a Fulton speech 2 declaring a Cold War 2 with Russia. The dichotomy was very clear and simple – either Russia becomes democratic or it becomes an enemy. That was definitely a shock to everyone. Last time such obnoxiously rude rhetoric we heard twenty five years ago from Ronald Reagan and the addressee was the Soviet Union. Putin was given a very strong signal – America takes freedom and democracy very, very, very seriously. Next day Dick goes to Kazakhstan and every Russian who took his words very seriously did expect to hear Cheney using 4-letter words describing the state of democracy in that country. Instead Cheney was mumbling how happy he was with democracy in Kazakhstan and patted Khan Nazarbayev on the shoulder for moving in the right direction. Next day we are informed that Nazarbayev agreed to join the trans-Kaspian pipe construction.

What do we learn from such verbal maneuvers? First, that America does not really give a damn about freedom and democracy. They are nothing but empty words. When any country does not agree with the US international politics it immediately becomes undemocratic. When any dictatorship does what America wants its democracy status raises to incredible heights. This is a very powerful and meaningful signal. It means that even if Putin gives complete freedom to ORT and RTV, even if he resigns, even if he stops bothering Ukraine and Georgia, he would still be treated as very undemocratic. But the moment he, for example, agrees to punish Iran the US-way, he could immediately double gas prices for the US tiny Eastern European liegemen fearing no political consequences. It only takes some arithmetical calculations: we loose X if we stop building nuclear power stations in Iran and we gain Y if we introduce market prices for the Baltics, Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia. If X is very close to Y then we have every chance to improve our freedom status and American limitrophes will shut up (or will not be heard by American corporate media, what is the same).

Second, we learn that America is not that strong as it used to be. “Zeus, you are angered. That means you are wrong.” In the 20^th century diplomats used to say, “Speak softly but carry a stick in your hand”. Nowadays, as one wise man said, America prefers another saying, “Yell at the top of your lungs and hope that others won’t notice that your stick is broken.”

Third, we learn that America is very myopic. So myopic that winning in some minor internal quarrels means more than loosing global international partners. I don’t talk about allies as in the last three years America alienated all of them (parasites don’t count as allies). Dick definitely gained some points with right-wing Republicans at home for being “hard with Russia”. The fact that the level of anti-Americanism among Russians rose 8% doesn’t bother him at all. Russia is not a democratic country, so Russians will not be given a chance to vote for an anti-American president, won’t they? Iranians voted for an anti-American president although a much more liberal candidate had every chance to win just because Iranians are stupid (or brainwashed). The fact that the US became double hostile towards Iran before the presidential elections doesn’t have anything to do with the outcome.

American political system was based on the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. Two hundred years ago educated public sincerely believed that power corrupts but absolute power corrupts absolutely. So the system of check and balances was introduced. Nowadays America is the only super power. Its power is absolute and no matter how sympathetic I am towards Americans I do realize that the Founding Fathers were right in the long run. American absolute global power makes America absolutely corrupt in the world where no checks and balances exist for this rich, hypocritical, greedy and war-mongering hulk.

Demonizing Russia

2006-05-04T18:02:00.000+04:00

I couldn't help but post this comment made by Patrick Armstrong, analyst for the Canadian government, from Untimely Thoughts (Peter Lavelle's project).

There's always a standing bill of indictment against Russia, although the details continually change. In 2001 the Washington Post warned that Russia would default on debt repayments; the Kursk sinking prompted reflections on the "callous disregard for human life" of Russia's leadership (Knight 2000); in 1997 Kissinger was complaining about Russia's "refusal" to demarcate its borders; no Russian leader had ever left power voluntarily and neither would Yeltsin, warned Stephen Cohen in 1994. Most charges prove ephemeral or false - nuclear tests in Nova Zemlya, the Security Council as the "new Politburo", war over the Black Sea Fleet - but others come up again and again. Some charges have validity. The war in Chechnya was certainly very brutal. Putin has centralized power and tightened control over the media. But, when these charges appear on the bill of indictment, they appear without context. The Russian army is brutal in Chechnya not necessarily because it wants to be, but because bad armies are brutal. And, despite "fabricated rumors of a Chechen-al Qaeda nexus" (Washington Times, 2002), we know better. Nor do we hear as much about "unresolved" (Guardian, 2000) apartment bombings when there have been so many jihadist bombings of nightclubs, railway stations, tourist resorts and mosques. Putin is centralising because he (and, be it clear, most Russians) agree that the 1990s were frighteningly chaotic. A centralised media is not desirable but neither was the media of the oligarch wars. Too many governors were the pawns of local hoods. Putin does have reasons, good or bad, for what he does: saying "tight-lipped 47-year-old KGB staffer" (Guardian, 2000) or "Andropov redux" (Gaffney, 2000) is not an explanation. When Brzezinski last year stormed that Moscow refused to repudiate the Hitler-Stalin pact, it wasn't just "nostalgic efforts by Vladimir Putin to restore Moscow's control": no country will assume responsibility for historical malfeasance when it knows the next step will be reparations claims.

While charging Putin with bringing back the "Soviet anthem" (Wall Street Journal, 2000), the fact that all the other state symbols were lifted straight from the Tsars was not mentioned. This is not argument, it is advocacy. The essence of the charge sheet style is that the conclusion determines the evidence. Take the everlasting assertion that Russia is naturally imperialist: this is the oldest of the charges - experts "knew" that Gorbachev would never leave Germany - and as time moves on, the accusation remains. The format is the same: Russia's so-called nostalgia for empire is asserted (Jonathon Eyal in 1993, Pipes in 1994 and 1998, George Tenet in 1997, Paul Goble 2000) and examples are filled in as needed: "democratic Georgia" today, the Baltics yesterday, Germany the day before. As the troops leave one country, another place is found to prove the point. The "energy weapon" is deployed against contumacious neighbors like Ukraine (but be careful not to mention that Gazprom is raising the price for "friends" like Armenia and Belarus, too). The charge predates Putin ЁC in 1993 The Economist decided that Georgia's independence had been already snuffed out and the energy wars have been going on since 1991.

Rarely, however, is it pointed out that Russia's neighbors are more independent each year and that Russian troops are leaving them too. Or that while Ukraine needs Russian energy, Russia needs Ukrainian pipelines to move its gas to those who actually pay for it. The boot here is actually on both feet. "Imperialist Russia", it is clear, is a premise, not a conclusion. The repetitive bills of indictment have a cumulative effect - people forget the alarums that never came to pass but remember the underlying message that Russia is a menace. Why try to take an objective look at the whole of Russian reality when "traditional Russian imperialism" (Kissinger, 1997) is all you need to know? A great deal of opinion in the USA and the West has been shaped by the continual drum roll of warnings, accusations and indictments. Eventually the message gets stuck in: Russia is an enemy.

Putin hires a Western PR company to help improving Russia's image in the world. Absolutely hopeless. I think it's better to forget about "image problems" and go our own way. Собака лает - караван идет.

Giggling at V-Day

2006-05-04T15:10:00.000+04:00

Josefina Lundblad, a poet and writer from Gothenburg, Sweden, and a student at the Omsk State Pedagogical University, wrote an op-ed in the Moscow Times today:

It's easy to laugh at Russia and the Russians when it comes to history. What other than a giggle can a country expect when it acknowledges only the sweeter bits from the cupboard of the past? How is an educated foreigner expected to swallow amusement when a state prefers legend to fact?

I have chuckled at everything from Poltava to perestroika in my Russian life, and I shamelessly laughed out loud at their Victory Day for more than a year. On May 9, Russia celebrates a Communist victory over fascism and the end of the Great Patriotic War, what those further west call World War II and consider to have ended on May 8, 1945.

Giggling about how stupid Russians celebrate their Victory Day is a personal problem of Josefina. She might probably laughs like mad looking at Jews commemorating Holocaust but why was it necessary to share the fun with thousands of MT readers, more than half of them Russians? Josefina at least could check some facts before writing. Great Patriotic War is a part of World War II and we mean by the name only the war between Germany and the USSR. Germany signed the Instrument of Surrender at midnight May, 8, 1945 when it was already May, 9 in Moscow. World War II ended September, 2, 1945 with the surrender of Japan. May, 9 is not a “Communist victory” over fascism. It is a victory of the USSR over Nazi Germany.

But Victory Day is not simply a day. Victory Day is a concept, an occasion that seems more like a national or maybe state brand. Its influence and force in everyday reality can easily be measured by taking a walk through any average-size Russian town, where the image of Victory Day meets you everywhere. Here in Omsk, the new Metro Bridge was renamed the "60 Years of Victory Bridge" when it opened last fall, partly because there is as of yet no existing metro. The biggest park is called Victory Park, and there are Victory Streets and countless Victory memorials that all in one way or another honor the triumph in the war.

It was at this hysteria that I giggled heartlessly for almost an entire year, until I realized why this day has the overly tense feel that it has. The Soviet Union left very little behind that inspires joy, pride and patriotism, and maybe, maybe out of 70 years, all that remains is one good day.

Needless to say – for every Russian Josefina’s words are blasphemous. I’m not going to start rants about 20 millions people who died fighting German Nazism. I can only add that the fact that these words are written by a Swede make then even more blasphemous.

Swedish schoolchildren today are taught that Swedish criminal “neutrality” during the WWII was not a shame but a good thing that helped so many Swedes not to be killed or wounded. Swedes valued their precious lives so much that they behaved as cowardly whores: letting German troops through their territory, selling them iron, signing anti-Jewish laws. Swedish government even censored press – all anti-German remarks were banned. They could anger Hitler. But the moment Sweden realized that Germany is loosing the war it started wagging its tail, licking hands of the Allies and barking at Germans. I imagine Josefina’s grandparents giggling and laughing in 1945. “We are so smart! Those silly Americans, Brits and Soviets lost so many people but we survived and even made a lot of money. He-he-he.” Ласковый теленок двух маток сосет.

Case of Kim F.

2006-05-03T16:35:00.000+04:00

The case of Kim F. (also known as La Russophobe) is an interesting and edifying example of neurotic escapism when a person develops a special mechanism of escaping freedom by negating the personal independence and merging her Ego with something or someone superior, thus gaining powers that the individual personally lacks.

The source of Kim F’s psychological problems certainly lies in her childhood. She was bred up by a very authoritarian, rigorous and stern Parent. In her childhood there was no place for love, for self-reliance or for feeling of confidence. Kim’s attitude towards power, as symbolized by her Parent’s figure, is ambivalent. On one hand there is always one power she hates and another power she worships. She is filled with severe loneliness, feebleness, spite but at the same her craving to rule over minds of other people is limitless. This irrational thirst for power and desire to be loved is what makes an authoritarian personality. It is not yet clear what exact roles Kim’s parents played in forming her personality but the fact that the object of her irrational hate is hard power autocratic Mother Russia and the object of her love is soft power theocratic Father America gives us some better understanding on the subject of role structure of Kim’s family.

Distinct forms of this mechanism could be found in the striving for domination and for submission. In everyday life this mechanism manifests itself in masochism and sadism. Let us start with the analysis of Kim F’s masochistic tendencies. At the core of masochism lies the feeling of inferiority, feebleness and insignificance. Kim F. always provokes other people to insult her and then finds immense pleasure in desperately fighting back provoking yet more abuse and humiliations. It comes as no surprise that Kim’s favorite poet is Mikhail Lermontov – a romantic Russian poet whose masochistic behavior was the major cause of his tragic death at the age of 27. Kim F. is fascinated with Lermontov’s poem “Mtsyri” that tells the story of a youth who run away from monastery, spent several days fighting for his life in the wilderness, started a hopeless fight with a mountain ounce and was mortally wounded by it. Kim F. associates herself with Mtsyri when she goes on with her personal crusade against Mother Russia.

It is evident that Kim F. is neurotic. In her fight with the Evil Empire her rhetorical instrument of choice is reductionism. She singles out some fact about life in contemporary Russia and makes broad generalizations on the “evilness” of Russia in general. This is not surprising as she approaches her own health in exactly the same way. Kim F. believes that she is a very sick person. She views one cough as a sign of TB, stomach pains as a sign of ulcer and headache as a sign of meningitis. Such neurotic phobias also manifest themselves in Kim’s hate of her body or of any human body in general. She is horrified at Myskina photographs in GQ that she calls soft porn and the idea of Russian banya disgusts her immensely. Most probably Kim F. is obese or unhealthy anorexic. It is also possible that the fear of human body is a result of strict religious education in the childhood.

Masochism in Kim’s personality comes together with sadism that is not at all surprising. Sadism is just another side of inferiority complex and utter loneliness. Kim F. enjoys abusing and humiliating people as it makes her feels stronger, smarter and more significant as she actually is. The rationalization of her sadistic behavior is simple, “Every means is right when you fight people who support the Evil Empire”.

At the same time Kim F. is incredibly sensitive towards flattery. She meets every commendation with almost childish joy and happiness. In case nobody cares Kim F. can indulge in self-flattery.

We could not help but notice that Kim’s severe depressions became less frequent and less severe as she started blogging. Blogging is definitely a perfect means of sublimating the patient’s irrational fears and phobias. Blogging makes Kim F. famous - Fame and Glory is what she values above all as they are evident proves of the person's Power.

We wish Kim F. well and ask all bloggers she comes into contact with to support the treatment of the patient by satisfying her sadomasochistic needs in the virtual reality.

Virus Myth

2006-04-28T15:41:00.000+04:00

Yesterday on NTV there was a very heated debate on HIV/AIDS problems in Russia. Although none of the participants doubted that HIV causes AIDS some facts were given that should at least make people take more critical approach towards HIV/AIDS causal relationship. For example, there are 17 800 registered people with HIV in Moscow. Some of them have HIV for more than 10 years without any dire consequences. At the same time there are only 510 people with AIDS and all of them are either junkies or people suffering from severe malnutrition. Dr. Peter Duesberg was the first whistleblower who thought that HIV is just a retro-virus that even theoretically cannot cause AIDS. For those who don’t know – people don’t die from AIDS. People die from so called AIDS caused deceases, the most wide-spread of which is pneumonia. When a person with HIV died from pneumonia it’s announced that the person died from AIDS. When no trace of HIV is found then the cause of death is simple pneumonia.

People with critical thinking are invited to visit Virusmyth.Com for more information. People with dogmatic and uncritical thinking are asked not to post comments, like, “Denying AIDS is the same as denying Holocaust, you dirty russki schwein”. Thanks God, we don’t live in Germany or Austria where people are thrown to jail for having thoughts that don’t coincide with official government versions.

HIV/AIDS critics are completely ostracized socially, politically and academically. Still there are many renowned scientists who were not afraid to be critical. Among them:

Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein, who held a MacArthur Prize fellowship from 1981 to 1986, is associate professor of physiology at Michigan State University. Root-Bernstein, who made like Duesberg a thorough study of the AIDS literature.

The Perth Group of medical scientists from Perth, Australia, is also questioning HIV and AIDS. The team is headed by Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos, professor of medical physics at Royal Perth Hospital, a teaching hospital at the University of Western Australia. The group studied the AIDS literature too, and was able to publish some of their findings.

Dr. Gordon Stewart is professor emeritus of public health at Glasgow University, and a former WHO adviser on AIDS. Professor Stewart studied the epidemiology of AIDS in the U.K. and other countries, and came also to the conclusion that AIDS is not a viral but a multi-causal behavioral disease.

Dr. Alfred H?ssig, (1921-1999) was professor emeritus in immunology at the University of Bern, Director of the Swiss Red Cross Transfusion Service, and President of the Board of Trustees of the International Society of Blood Transfusion. With colleagues he formed the Study Group for Nutrition and Immunity. The Swiss research group doesn't believe that HIV causes AIDS either. According to H?ssig et al. AIDS is a multi-causal disease caused by severe stress.

The inventor of the polymerase chain reaction, a technique used in AIDS tests, Dr. Kary Mullis, 1993 Nobel prize winner, questions HIV and AIDS. Together with the founder of The Group Dr. Charles Thomas Jr., a former Harvard and Johns Hopkins professor, and with Phillip Johnson, Mullis wrote several articles.

Dr. Richard Strohman is professor emeritus in molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Charles Geshekter is another AIDS dissident and a professor of African history at the California State University, Chico

Dr. Etienne de Harven is emeritus professor of pathology, University of Toronto. He worked in electron microscopy primarily on the ultrastructure of retroviruses throughout his professional career of 25 years at the Sloan Kettering Institute in New York and 13 years at the University of Toronto.

New York psychiatrist Dr. Casper Schmidt was one of the first to explore the psychosocial background of AIDS.

The German virologist Dr. Stefan Lanka studied the virological data, and came also to the conclusion that HIV is a lab fantasy.

Dr. Heinrich Kremer was medical director of the Federal Clinics for Juvenile and Young Adult Drug Offenders for five German counties, including Berlin, Bremen, and Hamburg.

The list is just too long. If not for Internet we wouldn’t have known about these people, their research and conclusions. Be critical to what you Big Brother says.

Visit http://www.virusmyth.net/aids/

Imperialistic Gas

2006-04-24T17:16:00.000+04:00

How many lies and distortionы can an editor of Washington Post pack into one editorial? Let us count them in this piece called “Imperialist Gas. Russia doesn't want to "politicize" energy sales. It just wants to use them to bully its neighbors.” Published April, 23.

Last week the chairman of the state-controlled gas exporter, Gazprom, which provides a quarter of the European Union's supply, crudely threatened E.U. governments that his company will sell its product in other markets unless they give way to its "international ambitions."

What is meant here by “crudely threatening”. EU governments stated plain and clear, that they see Gazprom only as a wholesale gas supplier.

EU governments stated plain and clear that they want to “diversify” gas supply and started looking for alternative suppliers. Gazprom is highly dependent on European consumers. When it started asking evident questions – would “diversification” mean buying less gas from Gazprom or would it mean that Gazprom’s strategic plans to increase gas supply to Europe are useless, EU governments hinted that, “Yes. When we find alternative suppliers we will buy less gas from Russia”.

Gazprom made a conclusion - in this situation EU markets become too risky and the company might think about alternative consumers in Asia. This statement was regarded as blackmail and crude threats. Where is a threat? Who is threatening whom? What alternatives does Europe give to Gazprom? Why does a natural desire of a company to increase its profits makes EU so hysterical? 49% of GP shares are publicly traded and major Europeans mutual funds have them in their portfolios.

The chairman, Alexei Miller, was reacting to reports of British unease at the possibility that Gazprom might seek to purchase Britain's largest gas company.

“Unease” here means that British government thinks about a special bill with the sole purpose – to ban Gazprom from privatization tender of Centrica. If someone doesn’t know – Gazprom doesn’t sell gas to the UK. The country has its own resources.

Lacking Soviet military might or a large economy, Mr. Putin now describes Russia as an "energy superpower."

It’s a lie. Putin never described Russia as an “energy superpower”.

He offered a taste of what this might mean in January, when he personally ordered a cutoff of gas to Ukraine -- which had the temerity to reject his candidate in a presidential election -- even though this also meant a shortage of gas in Vienna, Rome and Berlin.

“Even though” this meant that Ukraine started stealing Italian, Austrian and German gas. In this conflict Putin acted as a pathetic weakling. He immediately agreed to go on subsidizing Ukraine with cheap $95 per 1000 m3 gas. He immediately agreed with Ukraine’s demand to pay twice for gas transportation. The only “good” thing – before the conflict Ukraine was stealing gas with impunity. Now it informs post factum how much it siphoned for its own needs and promises to pay for it later - $800 million so far in just 4 months.

As for the politicization of economic markets, Europeans wondering about Russia's intentions need look no farther than Georgia and Moldova, two former Soviet republics that, like Ukraine, have attempted to consolidate democracies and establish independence from Moscow.

Anyway, Moscow is eagerly helping them to establish independence – no more subsidized gas and no more imports of poisonous ersatz-wine. Total independence and freedom!

Late last month Russia abruptly banned the import of their wines, even though these supply more than 40 percent of the Russian market and account for a large part of the two countries' foreign exports. The health reasons cited by Russian officials were unserious.

If health reasons are not serious why then American and European authorities ban wine exports from Georgia and Moldova? American FDA was the first to do it. The reason is simple – health dangers. In this perverse world civilized countries don’t want to endanger health of their citizens but “uncivilized” Russia must import wine with DDT. There is one very easy way for civilized countries to help Ukraine – pay for Ukrainian gas. Refusal. Another very civilized way to help Moldova and Georgia – import their wine. Europe refuses yet again – this wine is a far cry from civilized standards. But somehow “uncivilized” Russia (with uncivilized health standards, I persume) must do what American and European friends of young democracies refuse to.

If St. Petersburg can become the forum at which Western leaders make clear they will not accept Russia's use of economic blackmail or military force to dominate its neighbors, or its backing of a dictatorship in Belarus, then the summit might be worth having after all.

Western leaders for so long played with Russia typical “win – loose” games that they are horrified at the possibility that a scenario could be “win – win”. What should Western leaders do for that?

1. Stop economic blackmail – let Gazprom to European retail natural gas markets.
2. Accept Kosovo scenarios for Transniest, Abkhasia and South Osetia.
3. Stop protecting opium production in Afghanistan and stop heroine traffic from Afghanistan to Russia. Destroy opium plantations. US troops can do it a one week.
4. Agree to buy natural gas at the border of Russia and not at the border of Ukraine. Negotiate directly with Ukraine transportation prices and “mystical gas disappearance” problems.

La Russophobe

2006-04-19T16:18:00.000+04:00

A new blog joins Russia watching blogosphere under a telling name “La Russophobe” by Kim Zigfeld (Kimberly Elisabeth Zigfeld, I persume?). She started the blog only a week ago but already posted twenty+ Russia (and Russians) bashing posts. For example, Anastasia Myskina semi-nude photos popped up in GQ. Kim comments:

Can't say as I recall Chris Everett or Martina Navratilova or Lindsey Davenport or the Williams sisters suddenly turning up nude, can you? And it's Russia that has the big problem with white slavery and rampant AIDS, isn't it? I wonder if the two could be at all related?

All in all Kim’s abhorrence and hatred against everything Russian is so brutal and totally irrational that she draws suspicion upon herself. What if she’s just an agent provocateur hired by Putin to discredit critics of Russian politics:

- Comrade Zigfeld, your task is posting hundreds of obnoxious comments at all Russia related blogs and blatantly insulting everyone who doesn’t agree with you. You aim – make every Russia watching blogger feel ashamed to share your opinions. I promise you a special bonus if the phrase, “You are no different from Kim Zigfeld”, becomes an affront to anyone who dares to criticize me. Verstanden?
- Yes, Comrade Putin. But I don’t know if I can cope with it. At least not 24/7.
- Do you know what a civic duty is? Consider it an order from Politburo of the “United Russia” party.
- Jawohl, mein Praesident.

Don't miss Kim's comment on Russia Blog forum.

Poor Yushchenko

2006-04-12T16:50:00.000+04:00

Ann Applebaum published a new op-ed in Washington Post named “Poison and Power In Ukraine”.

One of the first things he told me was that the criminal investigation into his poisoning had stalled. When he first came to office, the Ukrainian chief prosecutor -- still loyal to the previous, post-communist regime -- had dawdled, prevaricated and let the top witness in the case depart for Russia. The president, whose face is still mottled by side effects of the poison, said that Ukrainian authorities had asked the Russians to hand the witness over for questioning. And? He shrugged. "You see how it is," he said.

The dog ate my homework, indeed! Just a year ago Yushchenko was absolutely sure about who poisoned him. Now – you see how it is. We just sit here doing nothing and waiting when Russians (who swear they don’t know a thing about the mysterious witness) hand him over. Such behavior is outright stupid as more and more people begin to believe that his “poisoning” was a result of unsuccessful rejuvenation operation.

Far from omnipotent, he is surrounded by corrupt officials, many of whom are easily won over by a Kremlin awash in oil money, most of whom are still loyal to the previous, pro-Russian, post-communist regime. As president in a parliamentary system, his powers are limited in any case, but in Ukraine, where secret information his police officers intercept is more likely to be sent to Moscow than given to him, they are almost nonexistent.

Kuchma, the author of the book “Ukraine is not Russia” – is pro-Russian?! Big hairy invisible Russian hands everywhere. Ukrainian police officers, awash in Russian oil money, reporting directly to Putin, skipping their poor president on the way. Those pesky dogs eat all of my homeworks, Mrs. Applebaum.

But the truth seems much more straightforward to me. There is Yushchenko, alone in his big office. There is Ukraine, a country of 50 million people. And in between the two are thousands of people -- civil servants, politicians, journalists, business people -- who have deep financial and personal interests in maintaining the corrupt status quo. For Ukraine, the Orange Revolution was the easy part, compared with what lies ahead.

This passage is a good example why Washington Post proudly bears the name of Pravda on Potomac. As Petrovich from inosmi forum pointed out, here we see almost a word-by-word translation of numerous Pravda “op-ed” published in the early 30’s just before the infamous “purification” of the Communist Party. The picture is the same. There is good and hardworking Comrade Stalin, working late at night in his Kremlin office. There are millions of Soviet workers and peasants. And in between the two thousands of people – corrupt civil servants, secret Trotsky admirers, American spies, and unrepentant White Guards officers – who have deep interests in maintaining the corrupt status quo. For the USSR, the Great October Socialist Revolution was the easy part, compared with what lies ahead. What lies ahead, Mrs. Applebaum? How can we get rid of these enemies of the people? Should we tolerate them or should we crush them with our revolutionary implacable fist of steel? Should we be afraid of their nasty conspiracies or should be wipe them clean from the book of history? In the name of freedom, democracy and equality. Amen.

More about Illarionov

2006-04-05T14:51:00.000+04:00

Dietwald Claus wrote an interesting article on the topic of Andrei Illarionov state of professionalism. "A latter day George Kennan? A Second Look at Andrei Illarionov" can be found here.

Besides some highly original data fishing and flimflamming, Mr. Illarionov presentation is a text-book example of how to use statistical data selectively and misleadingly in order to prove an arbitrary point. Impressive as his tables and charts may appear, at closer inspection most of them turn out to have been selected and presented in a manner that is not technically justifiable: scales of comparative data do not correspond, while others are chosen to deliberately over- or understate trends, depending on what Mr. Illarionov is trying to say. Almost always, these distortions are cleverly done, hard to spot at first glance, and difficult to criticize immediately. Criticizing each and every one of them would require far more time than Mr. Illarionov’s original presentation. Clearly, Mr. Illarionov knows exactly what he is doing.

Anybody who has had to with politics in any detail is familiar with the phenomenon that reported opinions tend to sound less reasonable than they are. The strange phenomenon with Mr. Illarionov is that when one reads directly what he has to say, and looks at the data he provides to back up his opinions, he appears increasingly unreasonable. In fact, he gives the impression of not only being wrong, but outright dishonest.

Ukrainian "Russians"

2006-04-03T16:06:00.000+04:00

Kiev International Institute of Sociology conducted a poll at the end of 2005. The results speak a lot about reasons why “pro-Russian” Yanukovich defeated “pro-Western” Yushchenko at the Ukrainian parliamentary elections.

According to the poll results 76,7% of respondents consider themselves Ukrainians and only 18,2% Russians. At the same time 44,2% of respondents consider their native language Ukrainian and 42,5% Russian, 11,3% speak so-called ‘Surzhik’ – a dialect linguistically stays between Ukrainian and Russian. In general 45,3% of respondents said it is easier for them to speak Russian and 44% - Ukrainian.

The results stress a very important point about East Ukraine – West Ukraine division. “Pro-Russian” here means – the right to be considered Russian (or Surzhik) speaking Ukrainian. Although the comparison is somewhat speculative but we are talking about the same phenomenon as English speaking Irish or Scots. When Ireland became independent one of the major problem of the new republic was – should we consider Irish we don’t speak Gaelic real Irish? There were several major attempts to make Gaelic the only official language of the country including total ban of English in mass media, government organizations, public speaking. That was time of political struggle between “pro-English” and “pro-Celtic”. But were these “pro-English” parties really “anti-Irish”? Does it hurt the independence of Ireland that English and Gaelic are both official languages of the country? Here is an article on the topic of independent Ireland and the language from Wikipedia.

Orange “democrats” believe that Ukrainian should be the only official language, Blue “democrats” think that Russian should be official too.

Via Regnum

Illarionomics

2006-03-30T16:32:00.000+04:00

A couple of years ago it was somewhat amusing to read Andrei Illarionov’s rants. I think the main reason Putin paid him salary (he was Putin’s advisor) was simple, “Do exactly the opposite to what Illarionov says and the country’s economy will prosper.” Andrei Illarionov for the last seven years was making horror doomsday forecasts – “Next month Russian economy will definitely crush! It’s already crushing! Crushing! Ahhh!” Kirill Pankratov has a great article on the state of Illarionov’s professionalism. You can find it here.

Illarionov is a charlatan like this. Many of his economic "ideas" are pure nonsense. The list is too numerous. I'll just give a couple of examples.
Among his two main recurring themes there are: a) Russia does not need foreign investments, and should push every available dollar out of the country lest they will cause ruble appreciation and decrease competitiveness; b) economic growth in the last few years is solely attributable to prices and increasing volumes of oil and other export commodities, i.e. more revenues from export coming into the country.
Aside from both being silly, these two things are in direct logical contradiction with one another. If more foreign currency coming into the country is bad for economic growth (a), then much higher export revenues from oil and other commodities would kill growth completely, rather than be its main driver (b). Any sane person pausing for five seconds would see that (a) and (b) are mutually exclusive. Illarionov and his coterie of admirers do not.

Since Illarionov banged the door of his Kremlin cozy office his rants became even worse – totally delirious. He definitely competes with Kasparov for the title “Russian Political Lunatic of the Year”. Ilaarionov’s letter was published today in Moscow News. Andrei was mad with one Beliakovich’s article in which it was proved beyond doubt that Illarionov is a moron.

Editor,
Beliakovich's letter accuses me of "either utter ignorance or purposeful misrepresentation of commonly known facts and easily accessible information." Let's look at whether this accusation is grounded.

Illarionov nowadays is developing a theory that economic growth in any country depends only on the level of its political and social freedoms. “Freedom” here means – what rating a country gets from Freedom House. This fundamentalist neocon organization always gives the highest rank to the US no matter what. When Putin started disagreeing with Washington advisors, Freedom House began lowering Russia’s rating and in 2006 this country became “not free” having the same rating as the Soviet Union had back in 1989. I once wrote how uninformed and unprofessional FH analysts are. For anyone who didn’t live in the USSR in 1989 and who doesn’t live in Russia today – comparing these two countries is like saying that in 2006 Afro-Americans in Louisiana are as free as they were in 1859.
So, Andrei Illarionov sincerely believes that because Russia’s FH rating is “not free” this country has no other choice but to stop growing economically, collapse into crisis and slide down to Cave Age. This should happen in one year or so. Here’s a proof he believes is irresistible:

Even for small oil countries like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the pattern seems to hold. For most of the last 30 years they were partially free, sliding into a non-free status relatively recently. In meantime, GDP per capita declined in Qatar from $57,000 in 1973 to $13,000 in 2005, and in UAE from $37,000 in 1974 to $22,000 in 2005.

Wow! Andrei forgot to mention that the population of these countries grew almost six times since 1973, an average family had 4,6 children on average in these years, life expectancy grew 18 years and women were almost completely ousted from productive activities. There’s difference between GDP produced by nomadic Bedouins or by office clerks and spa hotel workers.
It’s certainly cynical to say, but from purely economic point of view negative population growth, small families and high number of gastarbeiter help Russia in its GDP per capita growth.

Havel and Ukrainian elections

2006-03-27T17:34:00.000+04:00

Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, wrote an article in a German newspaper Die Welt on the hot topic of Ukrainian parliamentary elections. Among other things he contemplates on the positive side of Ukraine joining NATO and then pronounces:

Dar?ber m?ssen die Ukrainer selbst entscheiden. Nur so k?nnen sie ihre postrevolution?re Ern?chterung ?berwinden.
Ukrainians should decide themselves about this . Only this way they can overcome their disappointment.

The funny thing – the German word’s Ern?chterung main meaning is sobriety or sobering up. It is used in the meaning ‘disappointment’ figuratively. Well, I think the best way to overcome sobriety is getting drunk.

Mr. Havel might be a good guy but it doesn’t excuse lying. He writes:

Vor kurzem nannte Putin den Zerfall der Sowjetunion gar einen tragischen Fehler.
Not long ago Putin called the disintegration of the Soviet Union a tragic mistake.

This is a lie. First, Putin said not ‘tragic mistake’ but ‘geo-political catastrophe’. Second, by this he meant – and he said about it right after these words (they are ALWAYS omitted when Western corporate media cites the quote) – millions and millions of refuges, destroyed economy all over pose-Soviet Union, wars, massacres, genocide, poverty. What is it if not a catastrophe?

Again, like 15 months ago, Western corporate media is painting all Ukrainian parties in ‘pro-Western’ (good guys) and ‘pro-Russian’ (bad guys). This way it seems as if the forces of Evil Empire are counter-attacking. I think that painting Ukrainian politics in black and white is a very grave mistake. Before labeling someone pro-Russian one should think about some simple and obvious things. First, a huge share of Ukrainian citizens is ethnic Russians. Second, even a bigger share of ethnic Ukrainians consider Russian their native language. Exactly, like ethnic Irish or Scots consider their native language English. One can be 100% Irish without any knowledge of the Celtic language. Third, ‘pro-Western’ course didn’t bring root – grass any tangible benefits but a lot of blah-blah about ‘democratic values’ or such cynical stuff as ‘Ukraine without Russian is better than Ukraine with Russia’. The fact that so many Ukrainians don’t want to join US/EU cordon sanitaire around Russia shows that Ern?chterung is really coming.

Who is Mr Lukashenko?

2006-03-21T17:45:00.000+03:00

From Financial Times comes this editorial comment Bully boy of Belarus:

Mr Lukashenko, brightly dubbed Europe's last dictator, made sure he won by a margin unprecedented in the region since Soviet times. His 82 per cent vote is an insult to Belarusans and a reminder to other Europeans that even their own continent is not yet free of the scourge of dictatorship.

Not true. Mr. Saakashvili in Georgia had 97% vote and FT editors were treating that result as an unprecedented victory of democracy and freedom.

Apologists for Mr Lukashenko argue he has genuine support among Belarusans who value political and economic stability. This is true. But the country is heavily dependent on subsidised Russian oil and gas.

Statement on Russian subsidized gas is weak. Until 2006 Ukraine paid the same price for gas as Belorus but it didn’t bring political and economic stability. Price of $110 that Moldova, Georgia or Armenia pay for Russian gas should also be considered subsidized but it doesn’t help these countries.

Lukashenko's 82% of vote is quite probable although I think 70-75% is more realistic. There are several important reasons for this result:

1. Lukashenko is a super-populist. First, he doesn't stick to any ideology or rather his ideology fully coincides with a way 'a man from the street' thinks. He almost never does anything 80% of Belorusans don't agree with. Second, he's a very talented speaker who is not afraid to answer any kind of questions - and he does it well. Third, almost everything he does is focused on everyday needs of 'ordinary' people. Forth, in their everyday life only police or government officials suffer from the dictatorship. I'm not sure if I should add journalist or opposition leaders here. ALL Belorusans I know personally don't believe in their sufferings.

This is very important – I would say 90% of Belorusans PERSONALLY don’t feel like any of their freedoms are limited including freedom of speech: newspapers, radio, internet are fully available and unrestricted. Revolutions are made by people who personally feel that they are not free. Belorusans can and do travel to their neighbor countries and they can see for themselves that their living standards are higher.

2. Lukashenko's economic system is a kind of capitalism with a human face. For example, companies with high profits should buy underperformers. It takes a lot of time to register a business but rules of play are clear and corruption or racket are almost non existent. CEO of a large company is happy with $1500 monthly pay - a low skilled worker at the same company gets $400 monthly (in comparison in Russia it's $100 000 on one side and $100 on the other).

3. Social security is much better than in anywhere in the post-Soviet state including the Baltic States, although GDP per capita in Belorus is several times lower. Pensioners (the most active voters) enjoy quality of life many full-time working Russians don't have.

4. Lukashenko's war on corruption brought incredible results - in Belorus I often met government officials who were as helpful as waiters at American restaurants. Organized crime is very low and could be found only around drugs or illegal gambling.

5. The country is open - there are no problem going to work in Russia, for example. Belorusans don't need visa, work and residence permit to find a well-paid job in this country.

Ok, I can go on but as I said I'm not a Lukashenko apologist. All above mentioned points are necessary to stress the following argument:

1. Opposition in Belorus has nothing to offer to an ordinary person. They can only appeal to "capitalists" so to say who could make much more money without Lukashenko or to youth who sincerely believe that only Lukashenko is guilty they cannot become filth rich "capitalists" right now.

2. Lukashenko always points an accusing finger to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgystan or Moldova saying, "Look! Those idiots believed in a Western-type democracy! What did they get? Total chaos, poverty, inequality, corruption and wars. We are poorer economically than Russia but we live better." Opposition has no arguments here.

3. Opposition in Belorus is anti-Russian. Actually Western NGO's all over post-Soviet sphere subsidize ONLY anti-Russian opposition. No exceptions. This is a great mistake. The same as being anti-Semitic in Israel.

Knowing all this take yet another comment from the FT editor:

Also, Mr Lukashenko's approach is politically unsustainable. As incomes rise, Belorusans are demanding the same freedoms as others. It is no accident the greatest opposition is in Minsk, the richest city.

I doubt it strongly.

Stories from Orthodox

2006-03-16T16:11:00.000+03:00

Orthodox makes best comments on inosmi.ru forum. One can read all of his satirical stories here (knowledge of Russian is required). Here’s my translation of his latest comment.

Pro-American Post-Soviet States (PAPSS) should get stronger support from the US government demands US Counsil on Foreign Relations. In a secret amendment to the report we find concrete action points on how to make this kind of support stronger.

1. American Ambassador pats PAPSS on the shoulder. Stronger – Embraces PAPSS lovingly and kisses them in the lips.
2. Say that Russia has no right to raise prices on natural gas. Stronger – Russia has no right to sell natural gas at all.
3. Promise PAPSS that they’ll join European Union. Stronger – Promise they’ll join the USA.
4. Promise that soon PAPSS will get everything. Stronger – Promise that SOON is really coming! It’s coming! Coming!
5. Promise to bring PAPSS to NATO. Stronger – NATO HQ will be relocated from Brussels to the capital of PAPSS.
6. Bush visits PAPSS. Stronger – Bush buys rancho in PAPSS and spends vacations there.
7. Promise to give money. Stronger – Promise that Europe will give money.
8. Bring democratic values. Stronger – Double. No, triple the supply of democratic values.
9. Bring PAPSS troops to Iraq. Stronger – Use PAPSS troops to attack Iran.
10. Make a new geo-political block out of PAPSS. Stronger – Bring every country around Russia into this block. There’re so many na?ve idiots there.

US-Ukraine Cooperation

2006-03-15T16:11:00.000+03:00

Christian Science Monitor published an article “Keeping democracy alive in Ukraine” by Howard LaFranchi. Howard writes:

But now as a system insider, Ukraine Interior Minister Yuriy Lutsenko is discovering firsthand the hard work of building a new democracy. In Washington recently to advance US-Ukraine cooperation on justice and international crime, the youthful Mr. Lutsenko says he's learned that creating a clean and fair national police force is one of the most important determinants in a young democracy's success.

US-Ukraine cooperation on international crime? Does it mean Ukraine sends more troops to Iraq?

March, 8 and Equality

2006-03-10T16:10:00.000+03:00

I know that most of American and European women view the way Russians celebrate the 8th of March as machismo and anti-feminism. Why on earth human species with ovaries get gifts from human species without them? Before sneering at Russian women (and men) being so retrograde and so far behind from modern gender equality I would note that Russian women came to this “inequality” voluntarily and the hard way.

In the 1930’s the Soviet Union was far “ahead” in gender equality than any other country on earth. Being a housewife was almost a felony. Three months before birth of a child, three months after – and back to work. Salaries were strictly equal for men and women. Women were CEO’s, pilots, drivers, construction workers and heavy machinery operators. The 8th of March actually was a Soviet holiday to promote feminism and to glorify working women. Such capitalistic things as makeup, perfume or fashionable clothes – intended to keep women in imperialistic kitchen slavery – were frowned upon.

One of the things that surprised me greatly at American universities was that so few women (almost all of them foreigners) study engineering, accounting or medicine. I thought that American women, being so feministic, would love to study engineering. At school we were always told by our teachers that girls are better at mathematics and chemistry than boys.

Understanding that traditional gender roles were not capitalistic or imperialistic started in the USSR in the 1960’s and soon the 8th of March became, first, a kind of Mothers’ day and then as a holiday for every woman. Soviet women didn’t like the idea of being just human species with ovaries.

8th of March - Women All Over the World, Unite!

2006-03-07T18:12:00.000+03:00

Long live the International Women's Day!

Our friendship is unbreakable!

Failing Stalin Tests

2006-03-02T14:29:00.000+03:00

Sarah E. Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber - conducted sociological research in Russia and were horrified by the results. That’s what they wrote in Foreign Affairs:

Imagine that a scientific survey revealed that most Germans under 30 today viewed Hitler with ambivalence and that a majority thought he had done more good than bad. Imagine that about 20 percent said they would vote for him if he ran for president tomorrow. Now try to envision the horrified international response that would follow.
Of course, most contemporary Germans revile Hitler. But ask young Russians about Stalin, and you get answers very similar to those above.

The rest of the article is hysterical rants and ravings about bad Russian young people who "do not view Stalin — a man responsible for millions of deaths and enormous suffering — with the revulsion he deserves."
Can you imagine this?! Young Russians dare to disagree with the one and only possible opinion about Stalin as formulated by Big Democratic Brother!

Talking about the research results. First, contemporary Germans for having certain opinions about Hitler that don’t coincide with the official version could find themselves in jail. Then, “scientific” researchers a priori know that Stalin and Hitler are almost the same. I think Stalin should be better compared with Mao or Napoleon. And Hitler is better compared with the Japanese emperor Hirohito who is fully responsible for genocide of Chinese and Koreans. Actually, what contemporary young Japanese think about Hirohito? Third, the questionnaire of the research is very sloppy and unprofessional. Just for this question: “Do you agree that Stalin was directly responsible for the imprisonment, torture and execution of millions of innocent people?” they should’ve gotten F at their Sociological Research 101 class.

Ironically, Soviet students would’ve had straight A+ for their Stalin test from Mendelson and Gerber. Only in the 70’s they were allowed to think that Stalin did played a certain role in the Soviet victory in the WW2.

Irrespective what I personally think about Stalin and his deed I’m very glad that Russian youth have diverse opinions and views, that they don’t paint the world in black and white, that they are not afraid to speak their opinions out loud even if those opinions don’t coincide with the official schoolbook version.

The first thing most Russian students learn in the US or Europe – memorize what opinions are correct and what are not correct. Having incorrect opinions means that you will be socially ostracized and labeled as racist, anti-Semite, homophobe, machist, sexist, atheist, etc. etc. Sometimes I thought that many Americans had little Brezhnevs in their heads.

In this respect here's an interesting post from Owen who is a graduate student at St.Petersburg University.

What I still find astonishing is the level of openness to different ideas over here. I presented in a panel with graduate students of the best Russian universities, some of which held the standard Russian distrust of NATO. My presentation is somewhat hawkishly pro-NATO, and you would expect sneers and derision. Instead, there was genuine interest in what I had to say. The academic freedom dwarfs that in the United States. In college, I was always afraid to say anything that ran counter to the accepted views of academia, and we all know what those views are. Before speaking in front of a professor, I would always make sure I knew what they thought about the issue. And if my grade was on the line, I made sure to parrot what they said, or at least not stray too far from it. I can count on one hand the number of truly fair-minded professors I came across. That is truly a shame, and a detriment to the development of our civil society.

Fair and open debate is essential to the proper functioning of both society and government, and it's astonishing that elite Russian universities understand this better than elite American ones. Perhaps it's because they better understand the negative effect that thought control has on a country.

I've been tagged

2006-02-27T16:41:00.000+03:00

Thank you, Michele, for tagging me. No, I’m not going to ignore this game.

Four jobs I've had:
- Tourist guide in Siberian taiga
- Teaching Assistant at a business school somewhere in the middle of the US
- Unternehmensberater in Frankfurt
- Investment broker

Four movies I can watch over and over:
- Andrei Rublev
- White Sun of the Desert
- Some Like it Hot
- Gladiator

Four places I've lived:
- Frankfurt
- Kansas City
- Canterbury, Kent
- Togliatti

Four TV shows I like:
None

Four places I've vacationed:
- Rimini
- Barcelona
- Amsterdam
- Prague

Four of my favorite dishes:
- Russian Navy macaroni
- Spaghetti carbonara
- Sushi
- Pan Pizza Paperoni from Pizza Hut

Four sites I visit daily:
- Inosmi
- Kommersant
- Vedomosti
- Izvestia

Four Books I've Read This Year:
- Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper
- Open Society and Its Enemies by Karl Popper
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
- The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich Hayek

Four bloggers I’m tagging:
- Konstantin Dlutskiy
- Alistair
- Tim Newman
- Fiona

Salty Panic

2006-02-21T14:46:00.000+03:00

Russia section of Times is becoming my humor column of choice. Jeremy Page – probably, the most professional Russia watcher in that newspaper – explains why Russians are driven into a panic over salt.

Energy war drives Russians into a panic over their salt
Shoppers emptied shelves after rumours that Ukraine might have taste for revenge over gas supplies
A shortage of salt would be disturbing for Russians as it is traditionally offered with bread in wedding and welcome ceremonies, and is commonly used for preserving cucumbers and other vegetables.

He only forgot to mention that Russians have a wachy tradition of eating a big (16 kilos) sack of salt (съесть пуд соли) when they want to build real friendship with someone.

Jeremy, do you think my two tons stock of salt would be enough for all wedding and welcome ceremonies I plan for the next month?

NGO's in Russia. Again.

2006-02-15T15:06:00.000+03:00

Nabi Abdullaev from Moscow Times writes about the new Russian law on NGO’s “How Russia's NGO Law Stacks Up”:

Despite sizzling criticism from leading human rights groups, the new law on nongovernmental organizations is not as restrictive as similar legislation adopted by France, Finland and other developed democracies.

A review of legislation in France, Israel and Finland shows that they indeed are more restrictive. In France, an NGO must report all donations and bequests and can collect the money only with authorization from the head of the local administration, who first must examine the group's activities. Russian NGOs, in contrast, will have to report only donations from abroad.

Also, a French NGO is required to submit on request its accounting records to both the local administration and the Interior Ministry. In Russia, authorities will be permitted to carry out a financial check on an NGO only once a year.

Russia's law empowers authorities to examine whether an NGO is spending money on its declared program, while the French law only allows authorities to review whether an NGO's economic activities are unfairly competing with the commercial sector.

Russian NGOs have complained that the law uses vague language to describe the reasons a Russian branch of a foreign NGO can be denied registration. The list reads "threats to sovereignty, political independence, territorial integrity, national unity and originality, cultural heritage and the national interests of the Russian Federation." Most of those terms are left unexplained, opening the door for arbitrary interpretation on the part of bureaucrats.
But the French, Finnish and Israeli laws are nearly identical in their language. In France, an NGO can be denied registration or shut down if it is found to operate "contrary to the law, morals or integrity of the territory or the republic." Finland's law says almost the same thing.

In Israel, an NGO's purpose must not contradict the law, morality or public order. Public associations there are also prohibited from undermining Israeli democracy or serving as a screen for illegal activities.

Council of Europe experts are now scrutinizing the Russian law, and they have already found it to be much less restrictive than the initial version approved by the State Duma in November, Schirmer said. "Still, very much depends not on the wording but on how the law is applied," he said.

The idea is very simple but absurd and irrational. Good countries can have very restrictive laws on NGO’s because they are democratic and nice. Bad countries – like Russia – are not supposed to put any restrictions on NGO’s because these countries are very repressive and not democratic. But wait a minute! Just six months ago NGO’s activities in Russia were not restricted by Kremlin in any way. Still I don’t remember if any "freedom fighting" NGO said, “Thank you, Mr. Putin for your very liberal attitude towards us”. On the contrary, US-financed NGO’s were picturing themselves as being the most repressed in the whole world, suffering beyond imagination from Putin's political terror. Go figure.

Check Your Facts

2006-02-07T14:15:00.000+03:00

Wally Shedd from Accidental Russophile really trusts Independent and Novaya Gazeta. He wrote:

Independent Online Edition > Europe - "Putin to fund ski resort for Russia's rich"Nice little news article on the Russian government developing a ski resort. I seem to recall that this place is one of Putin's favorites (he has a house in Krasnaya Polyana, or so I have read).Is it just me, or does this seem like government spending to line one's own pockets?Further, as pointed out in the article:

In January, the government approved a ?6.5bn plan to upgrade Sochi's second-rate infrastructure and turn it into a year-round holiday resort. As the liberal Novaya Gazeta newspaper pointed out with not a little disapproval, this amount is more than 10 times what the Kremlin intends to spend on developing education this year and more than five times what it plans to spend on healthcare.

Seems if I were Russian, this would really p*ss me off.

I'm expecting Konstantin to jump on this, telling me how the Western Media has it all wrong again, and this ski resort is really all privately financed and will help orphaned children or something.

I’m right here, Wally. Always ready to invest 20 minutes into checking facts with the help of a wonderful service called “Google”. Let us start from the beginning:

1. July 19, 2005 City Council of Sochi came to a decision “To submit a bid for the XXII Winter Olympics”. Sochi’s bid was approved and supported by the Russian Olympic Committee and accepted by the International Olympic Committee (IOC). It’s a well-known fact.

2. In order to help Sochi win the bid Russian government decides to develop Sochi’s infrastructure. Here you find the text of the abovementioned federal program. It is decided that in the period of 2006-2014 the TOTAL amount of financing should not exceed 192,4 bln. Rubles. 1 British pound = 48,61 Russian rubles. That means the amount of 3,96 bln. GBP not 6,5 bln as Independent states. Lie #1.

2. Now we take a look at the Russian Federal Budget for 2006 (you need to download the document). What do we find? It is planned to spend 201,4 bln. Rubles (4,14 bln GBP) on education and 126,1 bln. Rubles (2,59 bln GBP) on healthcare in 2006. Is 3,96 TEN TIMES more than 4,14 ? Lie #2.

3. Also pay attention to the trick. Novaya Gazeta compares the 8-years budget of Sochi’s development project with wrong numbers of 2006 federal budget. 3,96 bln divided by 8 makes appr. 0,5 bln a year. See the difference?

4. The Sochi development program is about upgrading the infrastructure in whole, incl. roads, hotels, sewerage, water supply, etc. It's not about funding just a ski resort for Russia’s rich. Besides, I was in Krasnaya Polyana two years ago. If it’s a ski resort for rich than McDonalds is a restaurant for Russia’s super-rich.

All in all as a Russian I’m far from being p***d. On the opposite, I will be very proud and happy if 2014 Winter Olympics are be held in Russia. Wish us luck!

What is Soviet Style Journalism

2006-02-03T16:59:00.000+03:00

Edward Lozansky from Intelligent.ru writes about Pravda on Potomac.

During the Cold War the most vicious anti-American propaganda was carried by the Soviet newspaper Pravda, founded by none other than Vladimir (Nikolai) Lenin. The language used by Soviet journalists and commentators was so rude and hysterical that even people sympathetic to the Communist cause were turned off by it.

Since then, things have changed dramatically. That Pravda is out of business and the new Russian mainstream media have become quite civilized. This is not to say they are now very pro-American; some articles are quite critical of the US. However, the language used by Russian journalists is pretty professional, no longer resembling that of the Soviet times.
Ironically, in this zero-sum game it is now certain Western newspapers that have picked up the old Soviet style and use the tone and manners reminiscent of the good old Pravda vocabulary. The leader in this linguistic exchange is obviously the Washington Post. Read the Post’s Op-ed Editor Fred Hiatt’s articles on Russia, and you if have any nostalgia for agitprop you will be back in your element.

Johnson’s Russia List # 9327 carries two WP articles on Russia. One is signed by Mr. Hiatt, and the other is the editorial most likely written by him as well. As I went through both pieces I felt as if I were back in the USSR reading Kremlin propaganda stuff. Looking at some of the quotes: “…using energy revenue to prop up friendly dictators,” “buying a German ex-chancellor,” “clique of former KGB agents” — one can almost see Hiatt foaming at the mouth. He is also very unhappy with Bush for getting ready to go to St. Petersburg in July for the G-8 summit and for not giving orders to Putin on how much to charge for Russia’s natural gas.

I naively thought that America was trying to teach Russians to use free market mechanisms and that WTO is demanding that Russia use market prices for gas. A few clicks on Google showed that the real gas price these days is around $450 per 1000 cubic meters. Russia’s latest offer to Ukraine is almost half of that, but Mr. Hiatt believes that it is too high and demands that the White House jump both feet first into the gas war.

Dr. Edward Lozansky graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics & Engineering, and received his Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics from the Moscow Institute of Atomic Energy. After graduation he worked as a nuclear physicist in leading research institutions in Moscow and was also a Professor of Physics at the Military Tank Academy. In 1975 he lost all of his research and teaching positions for publicly criticizing Soviet foreign and domestic policies. Subsequently, in 1976 Dr. Lozansky moved to the United States where he did research and taught at the University of Rochester, NY and American University in Washington, DC.

Dr. Lozansky is President of the American University in Moscow, the first private university in Russia which he founded in 1990. He is also the founder and President of Kontinent USA Media group which publishes newspapers, magazines and books. Dr. Lozansky is the author of 12 books and over 400 articles in the areas of science and humanities.

Disco Show

2006-02-02T23:53:00.000+03:00

It happened. The dictatorial regime of blood-thirsty tyrant Putin the Terrible forced its enslaved and obedient media to commit an act of atrocious anti-Americanism. It showed an uncensored version of Bush’s State of the Union address.

What can I say? I couldn’t stop laughing for almost ten minutes. This show reminded me of an old Soviet-times joke. Chapaev’s sidekick Petka says, “Hey, Vasil Ivanovish. We had a great disco party yesterday. I was a dj.” – “Don’t give me s*** I know you have only one LP – Brezhnev’s speech at the 24th Congress of the Communist Party.” – “Yeah. I played it 5 times faster and it went – blah, blah, blah – clap, clap, clap - blah, blah, blah – clap, clap, clap.”
Twenty five years ago at school we were obliged to watch Brezhnev’s speeches. There are incredibly boring. A very old man speaks very slowly “The people of the USSR are proud to say that we are not dependent …” A huge congress hall full of old people slowly applauds.

In comparisons with Americans Soviets look lame. Very lame. I wonder what Bush did to make his fans have such ecstatically orgasmic eyes? Did they get free cocaine before the show? Condi surprised me. She was the star of the show, jumping up, clapping like mad, eating Comrade Bush with her eyes. I was almost sure – one more “blah, blah, blah” and she salutes with her right hand and shouts, “Heil, Bush!”.

Did anyone get it – what did George Bush actually say?

Only Paranoid Survive

2006-02-01T12:48:00.000+03:00

Wally Shedd has some interesting and original ideas about Russia’s paranoia about NATO extension over countries around its border. He says,

In fact, I would say this alarm is strictly a Russian situation. No other country in the world is so paranoid about having strong countries on their borders, as Russia.

Actually this is not quite so. India – Pakistan, China – Taiwan, Armenia – Turkey – Azerbaijan are the most evident examples. Then we need to look at more “civilized” countries: South Korea and Japan hate each other like no one else. Turkey and Greece (both of them NATO members). If you read Turkish or Greek newspapers you’d think these countries are on the brink of a full scale war. Indonesia and Malaysia – it a mystery why there’s no war between them. Then some “mild” examples: Spain and Marocco, UK and Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. As for Africa almost every country on the continent is so paranoid about its neighbors being strong that local wars almost never stop. To sum it up – universal generalizations, like “no other country in the world”, are usually very, VERY weak arguments.

Here’s another passage from Wally’s post –

Now, Americans who might be reading this ... try not to laugh ... but many Russians really believe that they are going to be invaded again someday. No really, I told you not to laugh. Stop laughing now. There is more than ice and tundra in Russia. Really, I've been there. Many Russians believe they could be attacked for their resources. Oil, metals, wood, what have you.

Let us test this passage by inversion

Now, Russian who might be reading this ... try not to laugh ... but many Georgians really believe that they are going to be invaded again someday. No really, I told you not to laugh. Stop laughing now. There is more than mountains and sheep in Georgia. They have a lot of democracy, that Russia currently needs desperately.

You see, now Russians are laughing but Americans are very serious. So serious that they find nothing funny when Wall Street Journal publishes an article by Nino Burdzhanidze Russia Is Making Very Dangerous Noises. In this article Nino states without doubt that Russia is planning to invade and occupy poor Georgia soon, probably tomorrow. Mind it – Nino's delirium is published not in Onion and not in National Enquirer. WSJ is considered serious and respectable.

Talking about paranoia – in the world of big business only paranoiacs survive. This is true for international relations in the long term. Nobody in Russia believes that the country will be invaded tomorrow or next month but what about in 20 years? In 30 or 50 years? Can anyone look so far ahead into the future? Do you believe in 50 years the world would be paradise of peace where a lion will lie with a lamb? Such a huge and scarcely populated country as Russia survived only because it was paranoid about its security. Indian tribes in North America were not paranoid.

Snarling Winnie-the-Pooh

2006-01-29T19:32:00.000+03:00

An experienced Soviet propaganda journalist had to go through a five-year university course as he needed extraordinary skills in order to have his articles published in Pravda. The most common requisition on “analyzing” international affairs was – (1) take facts about any event in the world, (2) consider conclusions that should always be like, “West is evil and is moving towards its collapse” and (3) construct any number of arguments to prove beyond doubt the inseparable link between (1) and (2). Anthony Robinson from “Prospect-Magazine” is doing the same. Only his task is to link (1) any facts on Russian politics and (2) Russia is evil and Putin is a war-mongering dictator. Here Mr. Robinson’s latest “commentariy” with the catchy head “Gazprom and the Snarling Bear”.

Whichever way you look at it, this was not just the action of a big gas company seeking to maximise profits – it was the Kremlin flexing its political muscles. Not quite the same, perhaps, as Khruschev rattling his nuclear rockets in Cuba, but a recognisable move from the same thuggish political repertoire.

Look at it straight. Market prices for gas means making Ukrainian politics independent from Russia. Low prices means flexing political muscles and keeping Ukraine dependent. Extra billion dollars revenue for Gazprom means economy. Giving away billions of dollars of a public coroporation to subsidize other countries means politics at the cost of shareholders. Not the other way round.

John Kennedy rattling his nuclear rockets in Turkey is conveniently dropped from analysis although it was Kennedy who first moved American nuclear missiles as close to the Soviet borders as possible.

This low price is part of the hidden cost of Moscow’s political support for central Asia’s authoritarian regimes and for allowing millions of "gastarbeiter" – mainly Uzbeks—to work on Russian construction sites, farms and factories. They send back remittances which keep their families alive and help dictators like Uzbekistan’s Islam Karimov and Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov remain in power.

This part is disgustingly cynical. First, there are millions of Ukrainians and Georgian “gasarbeiter” working in Russia who send back remittances to their families. Does it mean that Putin helps “democratic” leaders of Ukraine and Georgia. Second, the perverse logic suggests that if Putin doesn’t want to help dictators he should let Uzbek workers and their families starve to death.

Gazprom’s compromise with Ukraine came at the expense of central Asia, whose gas can only reach western Europe through Gazprom’s Russian pipelines. While Russia is no longer subsidising Ukraine, the Turkmens and Kazakhs are.

Hold on, Anthony! Do you mean now that Ukrainian democratic government is helping dictators like Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov remain in power as you stated in the previous passage? Shouldn’t the civilized world punish Yushchenko for his support of dictators? Should we condemn Saakashvili the Georgian for buying natural gas from Iran?

For all Boris Yeltsin's faults, his presidency saw the rebirth of civil society institutions and attitudes. These green shoots have now been covered back up with snow.

The most memorable green shoots of Yeltsin’s democracy were shelling the Russian parliament with tanks (hundreds of innocent people died) and shamelessly rigging elections of 1996.
Pravda analysts are lamers in comparison with Anthony. “For all faults of the Latvian Communist Party, its rule in 1945-1991 saw the rebirth of people’s power, true freedom and socialist democracy.”

It is hard to remember that only a year ago Putin appeared to have been knocked off course by the orange revolution in Ukraine, a pensioners' revolt at home and the emergence of a potential challenger in Mikhail Kasyanov, the former prime minister.

Mikhail Kasyanov – known to Russians as “Misha 2%” – is a potential challenger of Putin? Then Bobby Fisher is definitely the most dangerous challenger of George Bush. Knocked off course? By Orange revolution? By pensioner’s revolt? Tovarisch Robinson – you get only “C” for your propaganda class. Make your arguments look more probable.

and surveys show that it has increased dramatically since the Kremlin undermined the trend towards greater transparency and rule of law by its targeting of Khodorkovsky.

This is an outright lie. Although corruption in Russia is still unacceptably high it definitely decreased since thugs like Khodorkovsky could steal major energy corporations from the state, since he could buy entire parties and their votes, since he could pay as much taxes as he wished, since he could threaten Germann Gref, “You pass the energy bill the way I want or you’re destroyed”.

Recent events indicate that this is the way things are going. But two years is a long time in politics – especially in a country where even the past is so difficult to predict.

Yeah! Anthony Robinson has no problems predicting the past in the UK. Especially when it comes to finding WMD in Iraq.

I wonder, does Mr. Robinson understands that “analysts” like him are responsible for the fact that the majority of Russians treat Western “free thinking” as just another word for Soviet propaganda?

Anther color revolution

2006-01-28T21:36:00.000+03:00

Just a couple of months ago every Western "analitist" was wondering - where the the next color revolution would take place? "Rose revolution" in Georgia, "Orange revolution" in Ukraine? Who will be next? Belorus or Russia? Where "true democracy" would win? It turned out the next color revolution - "Green Revolution" - took place in Palestine. In the most free and democratic manner. I wonder when EU and US stop subsidizing Palestine would Washington Post write about evil imperialists that try to destroy a young democracy?

Putin the Paranoid

2006-01-27T17:26:00.000+03:00

From BBC News comes “Georgians blame 'GasPutin' for crisis”:

The crisis began on Sunday, when a series of explosions blew up two gas pipelines and an electricity power line in the North Caucasus, cutting off energy supplies to Georgia and neighbouring Armenia.

The explosions happened on Russian territory, but immediately Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili blamed Moscow for what he called a pre-planned act of sabotage, orchestrated by Russian officials.

He immediately flew to Europe and gave dozens of interviews urging the Civilized World to save his little but proud republic from Evil Empire before Putin nukes Tbilisi. Surprisingly mainstream media showed some common sense. Usually it takes Saakashvili’s words uncritically but this time they said, “Hmm. Putin is certainly a blood-hungry monster but isn’t it necessary to do some investigation before jumping to conclusions?” Among hysterical raves about Russia being an insecure gas supplier (it means Russia can’t stop Ukraine from stealing gas from Europeans) Putin only needs yet another scandal. Shooting in his own leg is very Putin-like. Everybody knows he’s a mad paranoiac.

Anyone who likes conspiracy theories should also consider other scenarios:
Saakashvili blew pipelines himself in order to boost anti-Russian sentiments among Georgians.
Georgian nationalists paid Chechens to blew pipelines because they hate the idea of selling Georgian pipelines to Gazprom.
Gazprom blew his own pipelines because he wants to buy Georgian pipelines cheap.

I think one should look to Abkhazia and Southern Osetia – two little but proud self-proclaimed republics who hate the idea of being a part of Georgian Empire. Unfortunately Georgia being ultra-imperialistic tries everything to bring Abkhazia and Osetia to its knees. No wonder Abkhazian and Osetian freedom fighters want to stop Georgian imperialism and together with Chechen freedom fighters do things in the name of peace and democracy, you know.

General Frost

2006-01-19T19:14:00.000+03:00

A couple of years ago I talked with one British intellectual about WWW2. As almost all British intellectuals younger than 50 he soon started talking about General Frost that saved Soviets from imminent catastrophe. I asked him, “What about Admiral Channel? If England were not separated from the Continent by English Channel it would’ve taken German tanks only a couple of weeks to roll over streets of Glasgow.” He went mad. Totally mad. He started raving about British patriotism, bravery, tenacity, professionalism, superb command, etc. etc. Admiral Channel saved Hitler, he said, as it also prevented Brits from rolling over Berlin in a week or so.

People who talk about General Frost somehow forgot that Russians are not superhuman and suffer from frost exactly the same way as Germans. Only Russians know Russians winters are cold but Germans (and French and Swedish before them) somehow forgot about it. It speaks a lot about German military professionalism.

General Frost defeated Soviets. Admiral Channel saved Brits. Colonel Tropical Rain devastated Americans in Vietnam. Mayor Heat supports Iraqi terrorists. Sergeant Nasty Balls prevented Johnny from becoming a dancing star.

PS. It’s -35F outside. Such a pity there are no enemies at the gate of Moscow. Frosts are wasted.

Be Brave!

2006-01-16T17:57:00.000+03:00

Nice Exceptions

2006-01-09T17:07:00.000+03:00

Sometimes I find articles that recover my trust in the freedom of press in Europe. In case with the Russian-Ukrainian gas conflict 99% of Western mainstream media were printing articles using blueprint: “Russia is imperialistic because it enslaves its neighbors with cheap gas. Russia is imperialistic because it enslaves its neighbors with market prices.” But from time to time one find out that there are some dissidents even in the UK. Here’s a articles published in The Times “Europe has left it too late to wrest back control from Russia over gas” By Carl Mortished.

It is brutal, but it is business. Gazprom’s imposition of an enforced new year energy slim on Ukraine brought a loud squeak from Kiev, followed by the sound of spanner on metal as Ukrainians tapped the Russian firm’s gas export lines to Europe.

If you think the Russians cruel for cutting off their neighbour, try the Ukrainian option when the gas bill next drops on your doormat (the price we pay in Britain, too, is about to soar). Tell the gas company that the price is unreasonable, refuse to pay and see what happens.

I can predict a flurry of indignant correspondence, the offer by the gas company of a brief period of relief and interim credit. Shortly thereafter, expect the arrival of a man in a little van to turn off your tap.

All this happened in Ukraine, except, unlike you, Ukrainians were enjoying very cheap gas, less than a quarter the price charged to most Europeans, a subsidy worth several billion dollars a year. Ukraine’s Orange Revolution (a declaration of independence from Moscow that never mentioned the word “gas”) released Gazprom from the political obligation to support financially a former Soviet comrade. So it behaved like any dominant supplier of a vital commodity in huge demand — it jacked up the price, in this case fourfold.
Europeans ought to know that the gas price is a thorny problem. It was the European Union and the United States that held up negotiations over Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organisation, arguing that Russian industry was enjoying an unfair energy subsidy from cheap gas. Eventually, the Kremlin agreed that Gazprom would raise gradually its domestic fuel price from $27 per 1,000 cubic metres in 2004 to a still cheap $60 by 2010. It would be difficult for Washington and Brussels to argue, then, that Ukrainians should be treated with kid gloves. Do we really want cheap Ukrainian steel, subsidised by underpriced Russian gas, dumped on our markets?

Russophobes in Washington and elsewhere may find it difficult to accept, but this is business, albeit of a Godfatherish variety. It may be true that President Putin egged on the gas merchants, savouring the discomfort of the naive President Yuschenko, who a year ago thumbed his nose at the Kremlin. Amusing, perhaps, for Mr Putin to present gas bills to Ukrainians as they shuffle to the polling booth next March. But Gazprom has its eyes on something bigger than Ukraine.

It is all about pipes. The Russian company wants control of its export routes, hence its insistence that payment for gas transit fees across Ukraine would no longer be made in gas but in cash at market rates. Initial talks about bringing the transit lines into a German- Russian-Ukrainian consortium are off the table, Ukraine having realised that it would lose its last bargaining chip.

Good job, Carl! You are among the few who can see the problem with eyes not harnessed.

Who Is to Gain?

2006-01-06T15:26:00.000+03:00

For those of my readers who wonder what kind of articles we read in Soviet newspapers some thirty years ago here’s a very good example – Jim Hoagland’s op-ed “Putin, Acting in Character” in Washington Post also known as Pravda on Potomac.
First, the premises -

National character continued to surface as the problem rolled westward. The Ukrainians -- reflexively portraying themselves as victims responding to the depredations of their more powerful neighbor -- responded by siphoning off their normal share of the gas flowing through the pipelines that cross their territory into Central and Western Europe.

And then the conclusion from it -

That inflicted the Russian cuts primarily on European Union consumers, who get about 25 percent of their natural gas supplies from Russia. Their howls of pain and outrage on Monday forced Putin to reconsider what he seems not to have considered at all: the likelihood that inflicting economic punishment could backfire on him. Russia promised to restore full supplies.

I suspect Jim Hoagland graduated cum laude with the degree in journalism from Moscow Communist Party School Higher School in 1981. I was sobbing. Russians are guilty that Ukrainians were stealing European gas. RUSSIA PROMISED TO RESTORE FULL SUPPLIES. Russia promised to compensate for the stolen gas. What an imperialistic monster!

This passage is the key -

Fearing that the Kremlin would use energy for political blackmail, Reagan focused American power on stopping the extension of Soviet gas pipelines into Western Europe. In 1982, I asked the French president about Washington's threats to sanction companies that cooperated in the project.

Jim clearly states that any cooperation between Europe and Russia is against American global interests. It was so in the Soviet times and it is so today. Keeping Europe and Russia as far away from each other is the best way to promote American world supremacy. Divide and Rule!

BBC forum on Russian Ukrainian gas war

2006-01-06T14:54:00.000+03:00

Lawrence Jarvik cited my rants on total logical inconsistence of mainstream Western media in “analyzing” who is to blame in Russian-Ukrainian gas war. Lawrence commented

Now, if I could only find a non-Russian who saw things this way...

Actually just yesterday I found a lot of non-Russians who see things this way at BBC news forum. Click here to read it. Approximately 85-90% of non-Russian forum participants believe that Russia is right. It’s ironic since the BBC article they comment upon is definitely anti-Russian. I’m really glad to find so many people who think independently and don’t rely on Cold War “analysis”.

Juggling With Facts

2006-01-05T12:32:00.000+03:00

It seems that Washington Post simple cannot write anything about Russia without juggling with a fact or two. In the article “Russia and Ukraine Reach Deal on Gas Peter Finn writes:

An uproar in Europe about dwindling gas supplies in the dead of winter, and pointed questions from European leaders about Russia's reliability as an energy partner, forced Gazprom on Tuesday to restore much of the natural gas it had cut off and restart negotiations with the Ukrainians.

And another passage –

Gazprom insisted it was putting enough gas into the system to meet the needs of Western Europe and accused Ukraine of stealing gas by siphoning it out of the system before it reached the country's western borders. Ukrainian officials denied they stole Russian gas. They also accused Gazprom of miscalculating the effects of its decision to reduce the volume of gas.

It was hardly surprising that Gazprom was ready that it would be accused of "miscalculating".
At every compression station on the Russian-Ukrainian border and at every station on Ukrainian- European border calculations were done by (1) SGS auditors and (2) German Ruhrgas auditors who stated without doubt that somehow 31% of natural gas was “lost” on the territory of Ukraine. On the other side Ukraine categorically refused to let independent expert control the flow and refused to state how much gas they received.
What’s more – yesterday Ukraine agreed that the gas was “lost” on its territory and agreed to pay for it. The fact that Yushchenko denied they stole Russian gas speaks about his inability to control Ukrainian gas oligarchs.

It seems that it was Gazprom that showed its reliability and Ukrainian Naftagas that demonstrated how shamefully it could steal European gas.

On Russian Ukrainian Gas War

2006-01-04T14:00:00.000+03:00

The way Western mainstream media “analyzed” Russian-Ukrainian natural gas crisis is the peak of idiocy. It simply incredible – a cocktail of logical inconsistencies, libel, juggling with fact and outright political propaganda. Just one “analytical” pearl that covers it all – Ukraine rightly refused to accept four times price hike as this price would ruin its economy. Does it mean that when natural gas prices would drop four times Russia would have the right to demand that Europeans pay the old price? Because such low prices would ruin Russian economy? Because well being of Russians depends on high gas prices? Because Evil West uses natural gas prices as an instrument of political blackmail? Because they want to put Putin on his knees? Would good Europeans agree with such arguments? I doubt it strongly. Actually I’m absolutely sure that Europeans would discard such arguments as stupid and silly. Somehow this perverse logic works well when it comes to Ukraine. It comes as a matter of fact that Russia must subsidize Ukrainian economy. It’s also funny that not a single “defender” of Ukrainian democracy offered a more simple way to help the Orange revolution – to compensate the variation of prices monetary not with putting more political pressure on Russian government.

Give me one good reason why Russian economy should suffer in order to promote anti-Russian “democracy” in Ukraine? Russen muessen sterbern damit Deutsche leben?

Mean Russian Jokes

2005-12-30T14:57:00.000+03:00

America is fighting two wars: one with terrorism and another with obesity. It’s double luck when it finds a fat terrorist.

New TV show “Who want to be a millionaire”. Its host Vladimir Putin invites all Russian billionaires to participate.

2020. After the crush of the European Union Latvia demanded monetary compensation for European occupation of the country. It also demanded that NATO occupation forces immediately leave the country together with 3 million of alien citizens of Turkish decent.

Soccer new. The hamster of Abramovich bought Yaroslavl’s Shinnik soccer team.

A team of construction workers from Kazakhstan will put tiles on your Shuttle.

Officer on duty reports to the Siberian jail chief, “Bad news: we don’t have any money, there’s no electricity, no water, no food, our guards are on strike. Good news: Khodorkovkiy is coming.”

When Jesus wants to punish America he sends storms, tornados, fires and floods. When he wants to punish other nations he sends Americans.

George Bush secretly visited Iraq. The level of secrecy was unprecedented. Only five persons knew about it. Lora Bush was informed an hour before the flight. George Bush wasn’t informed at all.

In order to make French police work in Paris more humanitarian it was decided to equip them with foam plastic baton, jets with warm water and banana flavored tear-gas.

Ukraine is a free democratic country at last. Before its president was elected in Moscow. Now in Washington.

After the democratic revolution in Kyrgyzstan its new government stated that it would be as warm and friendly towards Russian subsidies as before.

George Bush visited the State of Georgia and met its governor Mikhail Saakashvili.

Natural Gas Wars

2005-12-29T12:10:00.000+03:00

Sean Guillory from Sean’s Russia Blog comments on current Russian-Ukrainian natural gas crisis. I like Sean’s blog and although I almost always disagree with his conclusions I find his analysis well-thought, deep and logical. But this time it seems to me that Sean is misinformed.

Sean writes,
But some will argue that the political independence Yushchenko’s government seeks from its eastern “big bother” means that it must also accept an end to economic dependence and pay natural gas prices closer to “market value.”

Ukraine was the first to demand from Russia at the start of 2005 to stop barter exchange (natural gas for transportation) and use market prices. Russia eagerly accepted the idea but it turned out very soon that Ukraine means: market prices for natural gas transportation but the price of the gas itself should be as in 2004 50 USD per 1000 cubic m.

Ukraine has continued to enjoy the Russian gas subsidies at a rate of $50 per 1,000 cubic meters, but a few weeks ago Gazprom upped the price to $160 to begin at the new year.

Sean! Not a few weeks ago but in March 2005! A few weeks ago Ukraine decided that it’s time to bring ‘glasnost’ to negotiations. They decided to play the political card hoping to find support in the US and in Europe. It made an impression that the price was upped just a month ago. That’s wrong.
I don’t understand why Sean used inverted commas with the word market value? Does it mean “so-called market value” or “would-be market value”? Actually an average European market price for natural gas is 432.57 USD per 1000 cubic m.

When Ukraine resoundly rejected this as blackmail, Gazprom raised the price again to $230 in retaliation.

Again wrong. Dmitriy Medvedev stated it very clearly that the price became 230 USD when Gazprom discovered that Ukraine started selling natural gas to Rumania for 260 USD. Ukraine buys gas from Russia for 50 USD and then sells it to Rumania for 260 USD. That’s what we call market economy!

If one thinks that this is simply Russia adjusting to the laws of supply and demand and is not punishment for Yushchenko’s independence, keep in mind that Belarus, which is soundly in Moscow’s political pocket, will continue to get gas for $46 per 1,000 cubic meters.

Sean forgot to mention economic reasons for this price. In exchange for discount Belorus handed over to Gazprom control over Belorussian pipelines. Sean should remember that the war between Belorus and Gazprom was also very intense and that Gazprom also turned off the gas tap for Belorus. Only that fact was ignored by Western commentariat as it distorts the image of Putin who always supports Belorussian dictator because for some irrational reasons Putin loves tyrants.

I think it’s just common sense – Gazprom doesn’t need Ukraine. Gazprom needs Ukrainian pipelines in order to lower political risks and to prevent Ukrainian government from stealing gas with impunity. The moment Gazprom gets Ukrainian pipelines; Ukraine gets the same price for natural gas as Belorus.

All in all, I think there's one simple way out from this crisis. As Ukraine became pro-Western and pro-NATO why the US and EU don't compensate Ukraine the price disparity. It's only 3,6 billion USD. What a good way to demonstrate support for Ukrainian democracy.

Is AIDS a Scam?

2005-12-27T17:18:00.000+03:00

kurtkilgor commented on my post Is AIDS a Hoax?

Read this for an explanation of why the virusmyth site is at the least worthless, if not harmful: http://www.anaesthetist.com/icu/infect/virus/dues2.htmTo summarize, The central claim of the virusmyth-ologists is that nobody has proved that HIV causes AIDS. But the scientific method does not demand absolute proof of a theory -- it only demands that there is no DISproof. And there has not been found a substantial population of people suffering from AIDS who do not have HIV or some other known ailment such as congenital immunodeficiency.

Kurt is quite right when he says that the scientific method does not demand absolute proof of a theory – it only demands that there is no disproof. Carl Popper is one of my favorite philosophers and I also support his falsification methodology.

The problem is that AIDS theory is not falsifiable. It means that virus-ologists can not and will not state under what experimental conditions they would agree that they were wrong. The reason – AIDS theory is logically inconsistent. It says there is a strict causal connection that goes: HIV – immune deficiency – death. But people don’t die from AIDS. Their deaths are caused by innumerable mortal diseases caused mostly by immune deficiency. The most common is pneumonia.

Thus the logic of virus-ologist is shaky. When a person dies from pneumonia and he wasn’t HIV infected they say, “Pneumonia was the cause”. But if a person was HIV infected they say, “AIDS was the cause”. It’s impossible to falsify AIDS theory. Ergo, this theory belongs to the realm of pseudo-sciences.

Looking at the problem from strictly logical position we can (and should) treat equally several approaches in the causal sequences:

1. HIV – immune deficiency – death,
2. Immune deficiency - HIV (a harmless satellite virus) – death
3. HIV (harmless until...) - immune deficiency - HIV (make the deficiency worse) - death
4. Immune deficiency – HIV (a virus that actually HELPS fighting deficiency) – death
5. Immune deficiency – death.
plus any other possible combination.

Now if someone thinks that scientists work in all five directions he is absolutely wrong. All efforts are directed on sequence #1 plus some research on sequence #5 (as a helping tool for #1). All other possibilities are treated as malicious a priori and any scientist who makes an attempt to research #2, 3 or 4 is immediately ostracized. Peter Duesberg is one among the hundreds.

At the same time: (1) there are thousands who live with HIV for 10, 15, 20 years and die from causes that have nothing to do with AIDS and (2) the vast majority of AIDS victims are junkies but drugs abuse always destroys immune system.

Again on NGOs in Russia

2005-12-20T15:00:00.000+03:00

It was a real surprise to find an unbiased and balanced opinion on the Russian NGOs bill. Here's an article by Mary Dejevsky from "Open Democracy".

The desire to prevent foreign governments from using aid organisations and other NGOs to exert influence on domestic policy is the chief motivation for similar legislation that exists in several southern African countries, including South Africa. The registration of NGOs (mandatory or voluntary), the filing of accounts, and the exclusion of all political activity are among the requirements.
It is worth noting that in reporting this state of affairs in southern Africa, Human Rights Watch adopts a neutral, uncensorious tone. Russia’s proposed law, in contrast, has drawn a response verging on the hysterical. Is this another example of the double standard the west seems so often to apply to Russia, or is it rather that Russia’s draft law on NGOs is seen not as an isolated bill meeting a particular need, but as part of a wider illiberal and retrograde trend?

Another reason to support Putin

2005-12-20T13:58:00.000+03:00

Sometimes I get really scared when I read editorials on Russian politics in American newspapers. Ok. I know well that editorials are mostly subjective rants and ramblings but Richard S. Williamson is a former U.S. ambassador at the United Nations. This man represented the most powerful country in the world in the UN. Here’s the link.

Concerned by the spread of democracy and the contagion of color revolutions, Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, is moving to restrict Russian civil society.

This is an ugly example of logical inconsistency. “Is the king of France bald?” presupposes that France is a monarchy and it has a king although the question itself seems to address another topic. Let’s dissect the sentence. It implies that a spread of democracy = a color revolution but is simply untrue. As a president of a democratic country Putin MUST be concerned with the contagion of ANY revolution regardless its color. In 1917 Kerenskiy was couldn’t not stop the spread of the red revolution (financed by German “NGOs”) and the result was catastrophic.
What about changing “former KGB officer” to “the best friend and counselor of Anatoly Sobchak – one of the founding fathers of Russian democracy”?

The march of freedom has advanced in Georgia, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq and Kyrgyzstan.

Iraq and Afghanistan! One of the reasons we should support Putin is the fact that Russia still has nuclear weapons. Otherwise the march of democracy could happen in this country year ago.

President Putin fears the challenge from pluralism and democracy at home. Therefore, since the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Putin has rolled back freedoms in Russia.

Look at this sentence more closely. Again he read Putin’s thoughts and made a conclusion. It doesn’t matter that I – a person who lives in Russia – didn’t notice how my freedoms were restricted. Mr. Williamson knows it better.

Putin's government has launched a broad campaign to ensure that Russia's corrupt autocracy survives. Independent national television stations have been taken over.

Delirium! What campaign exactly? What independent television stations since the orange revolution were taken over? Even if we agree that 1st Channel, RTR and NTV are controlled by Putin there are 9 other NATIONAL television stations, including Putin-bashing RenTV with its 2% rating and 78% of coverage.

Pro-western parties have been driven out of parliament

They were driven out of parliament by the PEOPLE OF RUSSIA. In this country we don’t need pro-Western parties. We need PRO-RUSSIAN parties.

Business magnates who challenged Putin are prosecuted.

Business magnates who challenged the freedom of the Russian people and the integrity of the country. Thugs who not only stole the natural resources of the country but didn’t even bother to pay taxes.

The bill would force all foreign and domestic nongovernmental organizations regardless of their funding source to re-register with the authorities, inviting greater scrutiny and possible abolition of any group deemed threatening to the Kremlin's interests.

Deemed threatening to the interests of the people of Russia. I hate an idea that foreign governments finance Russian parties, train “orange revolutionaries” and open the city gates for the “march of freedom”.

The proposed law would drive most foreign NGOs out of Russia. It would be impossible for foundations such as the National Endowment on Democracy and the International Republican Institute to operate in Russia. And all Russian civic groups deemed suspicious by the authorities for any reason could be denied registration.

Two lies one after another. Oh, sorry. NED and IRI are financing opposition parties in Russia? Do they finance Chechen terrorists? Most foreign NGO’s financing opposition? Then they had to be kicked out of this country ages ago. The registration according to the bill COULD NOT be denied. It stated very clearly – you fill the form and you are registered. Just don’t forget to state your sources of financing.

As recognized in various human rights documents and numerous international treaties to which Russia is a party, people have a right to associate with whomever they please, to organize and express their views.

Exactly. Exactly. This is actually the essence of the bill. Mr. Williamson found a non-existent scare and is fighting it as a lunatic. If Bin Laden decides to register an “International Pan-Arabic Institute” in Washington, DC Mr. Williamson without doubt would support his right to associate with whomever he pleases, to organize and express his views.

The United States must stand with the people and against Putin's latest assault on Russian freedoms. Faced with criticisms from America and Europe, Putin has said he'll relax the planned crackdown on NGOs. Now is the time to redouble our efforts to support Russia's civil society.

Thank you, Mr. Putin for saving and modernizing Russian nuclear arsenals! I hope it would make people sharing Mr. Williamson views think twice before starting bombing my country to freedom.

Russians living in freedom, in a pluralistic society, and sharing our values are our natural friends and enduring allies.

We already live in freedom. We already live in a pluralistic society. We don’t share YOUR values because we have our own values. And we are ready to fight for them.

A corrupt autocracy seeking to roll back freedom, retrench and re-establish authoritarian rule will not be able to sustain stability at home nor be a friend on whom we can depend.

What is really scaring that the very same scenario was played with Serbia. First, blew the country’s problem out of proportion. Second, with the help of the mainstream media make a bloodthirsty monster out of the head of the country. Third, bomb the country into freedom. Forth, with the help of an well trained "orange" crowds install the marionette.

Watchdogs of Democracy

2005-12-16T20:03:00.000+03:00

Via mk

WEF Survey

2005-12-15T17:13:00.000+03:00

A global public opinion survey carried out for the World Economic Forum in 20 countries, interviewing more than 20,000 citizens, paints an alarming picture of declining levels of trust. The survey, carried out by GlobeScan, shows that trust in a range of institutions has dropped significantly since January 2004 to levels not seen since the months following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The poll also reveals that public trust in national governments and the United Nations has fallen the most over the past two years.
Click here for the full report and better quality graphs.

Of all the institutions examined, national governments have lost the most ground over the past two years. In twelve of the sixteen countries for which tracking data is available, public trust in the national government has declined by statistically significant margins, leaving only six of the tracking countries today with more citizens trusting their national government than distrusting them.

The major exception to these declining trust levels is Russia, where trust in the national government has increased steadily since 2001. Such consistent increases in trust are unique for any institution in any of the countries polled over this period.

In Russia, despite significant growth in trust, national companies are still distrusted by the majority.

My comment: I think this growth is due to two major facts: (1) trial over the Russian thug #1 Mr. Khodorkovskiy and (2) consequent “understanding” of survived oligarchs that this country is not their private property.

Decline in trust for NGOs is probably explained by the above mentioned Khodorkovskiy trial. It was outrageous when so many “independent” organizations spent millions and millions of dollars defending this thug – one of the worst human rights abuser in 90s.

It reminds me of a Russian joke. Mr. Ivanov returns from a Human Rights Watch conference in Moscow. “How was the conference?” he’s asked. - “It was really great. You know, guy, I was always mistrustful about all these abstract and surreal human rights. But now my eyes are open. Only it’s a pity that this Human should spend next 9 years of his life in jail.”

My Political Credo

2005-12-12T17:09:00.000+03:00

What's my political credo? I'm a liberal intelligent who supports the state although it sounds as an oxymoron. Sergei Roy, the editor of intelligent.ru (you find the English version of this site at the sidebar) defines it better than I do. Here's his thoughts about the poor state of Russian liberalism published by Peter Lavalle's Untimely Thoughts.

Putin is indeed a statist, and thus the opposite of liberal, in that he has stopped the country rolling along an inclined plane into the abyss of disintegration. By the end of Boris Yeltsin, the Liberal Pretender’s, rule, Russia was fast becoming an assemblage of fiefdoms that were “territories of free hunting” (Khodorkovsky’s phrase) for oligarchs/barons of two types, regional and financial-industrial, without a clear demarcation line between them. It came to pass that the biggest and the most impudent of these, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, made a grab for ultimate political power, buying the services of 250 deputies of the Duma and preparing to sell to a U.S.-based transnational 50 percent of the biggest oil company in the land, which would have put him beyond the reach of Russian law.

Putin put a stop to that, in the nick of time, and did some other things to restore the notorious “vertical of power,” which on closer inspection proves nothing more nor less than a functioning system of governance securing a more or less unified legal, political, and economic space.

What about Putin, the Statist Pretender’s, liberal credentials? Alas, they are no better than his predecessor’s. Although some of the oligarchs have been slapped into line, the oligarchy as a system of post-communist order is still with us and, which is more, it is thriving. Some of the members of Putin’s government – Mikhail Zurabov, German Gref, Viktor Khristenko – enjoy the tags of liberals, or neo-liberals, or radical liberals. In my view, these appellations can only be applied to these people if the word “liberal” has irreversibly passed into the swearword section of the Russian vocabulary. Monetization of social benefits was one example of their liberalism, housing and utilities reforms will be another. As a result of these liberal reforms, oligarchic profits (say, Zurabov’s pharmaceutical interests) will swell, while the populace at large will find itself in a still harsher grip of those oligarchic interests and at the mercy of the state’s handouts. Liberalism, forsooth.

I have stressed in the above the primary tenets of liberalism: freedom from state intervention and control over the sovereign individual’s affairs. In Russia, this principle has undergone a fantastic perversion: an owner or top manager of a company is free from state control and intervention precisely because he himself is the State – a government minister or a member of the President’s Administration. That’s what oligarchy is in a nutshell. And that’s what we have.

A few words on the subject of Russia’s political parties and liberalism – simply because they do not deserve more than a few words. I will leave Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal-Democratic Party entirely out of account; it is the proper provenance for the Public Prosecutor.

The Union of Right Forces, or SPS: Headed to this day by the founding fathers of oligarchic capitalism, it is a graphic illustration of the perversion of liberal principles, as described above. Chubais’s call for a “liberal empire” is a classic, in this respect: it will be an empire for a few “liberals” up top, just as it is now, and the masses vainly awaiting liberation from the slavery of poverty, at bottom.

Yabloko, the left-leaning branch of the liberal intelligentsia: For one thing, it is tarred with the oligarchic brush, much as it would like to expunge that memory. For years it fed out of Khodorkovsky’s hand. For another, it has shown a readiness to take Russian liberalism to a point at which Russia would simply disappear. During the 2000 presidential campaign, Anatoly Chubais had every right to call Yabloko head Grigory Yavlinsky a “traitor,” very publicly, on NTV, because of Yavlinsky’s stance on policy vis-?-vis Chechnya. I would hate to agree with Chubais on the time of day, but here he hit the nail right on the head: any concessions in the matter of Chechnya’s independence mean one thing, and one thing only – wave after wave of Islamic fundamentalism hitting Russia from the Caucasus, threatening to split it right down the middle, along the Turkic-populated regions of the Volga. As president, Yavlinsky would one day be crowned with the same laurels of Russia’s destroyer as Mikhail Gorbachev and Alexander Kerensky before him, not counting the scum that started the Times of Troubles.

So, aren’t there any true liberals left in Russia? There are. We are simply looking for them in the wrong places.

One locus is the same as decades and hundreds of years ago: the liberal intelligentsia. True, its role is pitiful right now, reduced to criticizing the current state of affairs and preaching to the younger generation that things can be different from the existing heap of manure as long as they keep the faith. A sad role, but a necessary one, and there are enough memories to sustain the intelligentsia in this role; it has seen much worse times. Words can barely say just how much worse they were.

The other agent is a much more robust one: the non-oligarchic capitalist. His fate is perhaps even worse than the pensive intellectual’s, for it is he who has to grapple with the forces of the bandit bureaucracy, the pressure of bandits in the more traditional sense, and of oligarchic monopolies. These people would be very much surprised if you informed them that they were the brightest hope of liberalism in Russia. Yet that is a fact. Of course, they are mostly extremely rough diamonds, their esthetic taste is abominable – you only have to look at the “castles” they are building all around Moscow or any other city. But, as Anna Akhmatova said, “If only you knew out of what garbage poems grow, unaware of shame.” Liberalism seems to be akin to good poetry, growing out of garbage. Among other things.

Freedom of Speech Is Finished

2005-12-05T20:00:00.000+03:00

Click here for a secret LA Times template for articles about life in Russia.

Fredom of speech and freedom of press

2005-12-02T18:46:00.000+03:00

When we want to make sense of what’s happening with freedom of speech and freedom of press in Russia we should make clear some basic premises. First, freedom of speech (or of expression) is the right of an individual. I – personally – have the right to speak whatever I like or to express any opinion possible. Press is nothing but a means that serves my personal freedom of speech. Not the other way round. Press is an institution that provides me with all necessary information I need to form my opinions. In some cases I pay them directly to get the information, sometimes I pay indirectly (TV gets money from advertisers that in their own turn include these expenses in the price of products), sometimes I don’t pay at all (blogs) and in some cases some “kind” government or NGO does it. Anyway, my freedom of speech should be unrestricted as long as I don’t maliciously abuse the rights of others.

It is true for all ‘natural’ human rights. Freedom to cook – freedom of grocery stores. Freedom to eat – freedom of restaurants. Freedom to travel – freedom of transportation agencies. Freedom to sleep – freedom of hotels.

For example, I have the undisputable right to eat and freedom to cook whatever I like, from any ingredients I like and with whatever cooking utensils I choose. Thus, grocery stores should be free to provide me with whatever products I fancy. At my home I also enjoy an undisputable freedom to treat my family, my friends and my guests with the fruits of my cooking exercises. And I hate the idea that some government inspector would try to suppress this freedom of mine (as long as cyanide is not my spice of choice).

But the moment I open a restaurant my personal freedom of cooking will be seriously limited and restricted by the government. When my friend asks me for a recipe of my bortscht I can say, “It’s my little secret” but in my restaurant my clients have every right to demand the answer. Government inspectors have every right to make bio-chemical analysis of my pelmeni, to control the quality of ingredients and to close down my outlet if they find rats there. In the same way freedom of press doesn’t mean that a newspaper has the right to defame, to libel or to slander simply because libel restricts my freedom of speech. It forces me to form wrong opinions. My freedoms – freedoms of an individual – always have priority over freedoms of commercial (or no-profit, irrespectively) organizations.

Next, if freedom of restaurants is here as a means to exercise freedom of eating, then it should adapt itself culture, religion and values of the people. Not the other way round. When 90% people are vegetarians but 90% of fast-food chains aggressively promote beef hamburgers, it could only mean that (1) restaurants owners are morons who refuse to make their outlets profitable or (2) they don’t give a damn about profits because they have their own agenda. Their activities could be financed by American Association of Free Butchers, for instance. Freedom of restaurants means that even when in the whole country there are only 50 people who like Thai food, the government shouldn’t prohibit opening of a single small Thai restaurant.
Let us go on with the freedom of cooking metaphor a bit further. Let us imagine that in some country in 1917 the power was taken over by the Party of Vegetarians. The idea of vegetarianism is very attractive and scientifically grounded. Then there was one wise German who in his book “Das Kooking Buch” proved beyond doubt that vegetarianism is the future of humankind and that total victory of vegetarians is inexorable historic necessity. Party of Vegetarians banned all protein containing foods. Even possession a single egg was punished by death. Some fifty years later Vegetarians allowed such products as milk or eggs but meat was still banned. People who doubted vegetarian ideas were sent to asylums. How can anyone in his right mind support the act of gorging flesh of murdered animals?

But one day the people lost all patience and overthrew the power of vegetarians. The Age of Freedom broke out. Freedom of eating and freedom of cooking. There were three major fast-food chains in the country that used to feed 100% of the population. They sold boiled broccolis and mashed carrots before. Now they started to sell hamburgers. Pretty soon people began to notice that the quality of those hamburgers was abysmal. New owners made hamburgers of rats, dogs and cats; they fed customers with rotten freedom fries and mildewed milk. Thousands died, millions got sick. But any time someone protested he was called the enemy of freedom and a supporter of evil ideas of vegetarianism. Freedom of eating was a sacred cow of the new regime but they made no difference between freedom of eating and freedom of fast food chains to use any means they see fit to make profits.

Some five years ago after another velvet revolution meat eaters lost total control over cafes, restaurants and grocery stores. At last people got an opportunity to eat whatever they like, be it broccoli, fish, bortscht or even hamburgers. Yes! There are dozens of very small outlets where hamburgers are served although most of the people hate them. Not that hamburgers per se are bad but the guys who cook (and cooked) them are. It seemed that only dishonest, corrupt, greedy and sleazy people could make hamburgers. Honest men are exempt from that profession.
Today the state of freedom of eating is not perfect at all. There are still a lot of problems sometimes very ugly ones but in general everyone can find a restaurant of choice with his favorite cuisine. 70% of population prefers traditional products, 15% are vegetarians, 10% have no definite preferences and only 5% like hamburgers. Unfortunately the most rich, powerful and ambitious organization in the world today is McDonalds. :-)

What's up with Olga Romanova?

2005-11-29T18:14:00.000+03:00

Alistair (Ruminations on Russia blog) posted:

MosNews reports that TNT has taken Olga Romanova off the air allegedly because she reported that Sergei Ivanov's son would not be charged for killing a elderly women whilst driving. You would have to look pretty hard to find that piece of news in the Russian language.
It does not mark the end of free speech on broadcast television; it was already dead. It is however, another example of the 5th directorate thugs believing that they can control the flow of news when it proves to be embarrassing. The good news is that the Russian narod are at least 2 steps ahead of the thugs and no longer get their news from the television.

One needs to watch Olga Romanova’s analytical show only once to come to the conclusion – she’s a junk journalist. And it’s absolutely irrelevant if she’s pro-Western liberal or pro-Putin nationalist or anti-everyone anarcho-syndicalist. She’s sloppy, cynical and definitely suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. But her personal problems are of no importance if only she could do – before going on air – such simple things as (1) research, (2) thinking about problem she wants to talk about, (3) looking for logical integrity or (4) writing down some plan of the show. Ok, not the plan but just some notes, like “First, I talk about this and then about that”. I tried to watch Romanova’s show two times and both times I couldn’t stand the test. A couple of weeks ago she was “analyzing” the crash of a Russian MiG in Lithuania. I listened to this delirium for two minutes:

Generals from the Ministry of Defense said there were secrets about the poor MiG but today they said there are no secrets. So one day there are secrets but then they suddenly disappear. What happened to them? How comes secrets become not secrets? I mean secrets should be kept secret. Right? If secrets are not secret they are no secrets at all. No one calls not secret things secret. You know what I mean. But under Putin’s regime secrets suddenly become no secrets in just one day. What if we suppose that they were not secrets but were made secret by someone who loves secrecy?

And this verbal diarrhea goes on and on and on and on… Romanova reminded me a freshman who wrote a 340 words essay and was thinking how broad should be margins so the essay could be 15 required pages long. In comparison with Romanova even Yilia Latynina sounds like a solid quality political analyst. At least Latynina always manages to insert a couple of non sequiturs into her columns. Romanova cannot do even that. But somehow we are supposed to view Romanova as a beacon of free and democratic journalism.

She wasn’t fired from RenTV. She just argued with security at the studio door. Somehow she got an idea that she was fired. She went hysterical, rushed to Ekho Moskvy Radio and gave an interview condemning Putin and his KGB hounds of crushing the freedom speech in Russia. Next morning at least a dozen of American and European newspapers run the story “Romanova is fired from RenTV. Free speech on broadcast television is dead”. I wonder if their readers’ memory span exceeds one week. When for a thousand and the first time they read about total annihilation of free speech in Russia, do they ever think, “Hey! Didn’t I read the very same story five years ago?” Like in a joke: Mr. Pupkin committed suicide by firing six shots into his head. One revealing fact: when it turned out that Romanova’s dismissal from RenTV was a false alarm, not a single Russia bashing newspaper even mentioned it.

Russian Chronicles

2005-11-24T18:29:00.000+03:00

Lisa Dickey and David Hillegas did a great job with their Russian Chronicles project. I’m truly amazed. This is one of the most unbiased and honest report on life in Russia I ever read made by a journalist not by a casual tourist. Someone said, “If in Russia you find a dilapidated house in a god forgotten Siberian village. If there’s a dead drunk Russian wino lying in dirt near that house. If that drunk is shouting “Down with Putin”, then be sure to find a Washington Post reporter nearby interviewing the man.” The last book from Washington Post reporters “Kremlin Rising” is a true example of this kind of junk journalism. Here’s a very good review of the book by Mark Ames “Bullshit Rising”. Nice title.

Russian Chronicles is a quite different report although the blog is hosted by WP.

Lisa writes:

It's been a long, illuminating trip. I really didn't know what to expect when I arrived here in August; though I'd lived in St. Petersburg from 1994 until the end of 1996, I'd only been back to Russia twice in the nine years since, for a week each time. All I knew about what was going on in Russia was what I gleaned from the news. And the news, of course, is mostly focused on politics and catastrophic events, such as the Kursk submarine sinking and terrorist attacks.

For that reason, I wanted to keep this blog as apolitical as possible, and as focused on the ordinary lives of ordinary people as I could make it. I wanted to know how Russians were really living -- not just how their politicians and oligarchs were faring.

She and David spent more than two months traveling by rail from Vladivostok to Moscow, then to Murmansk and to St. Peterburg. They visited 12 cities and met dozens of people.
I’m looking forward to the release of the book “Russian Chronicles. 10 Years Later". I’ll definitely be the one of the first to buy it.

Weird statistics

2005-11-23T18:58:00.000+03:00

Of 34 Americans who read my post "How to drink vodka and stay sober" in the last three days 9 visitors are from Beverly Hills, California. Can anyone explain it?

Calendar Wars

2005-11-21T18:12:00.000+03:00

Here's a very interesting article by Kirill Pankratov published in Exile that I fully endorse:

Thus Putin's entourage wanted to come up with a historical date close to November 7th. They found it in the events of 1613-the end of the twenty year-long "Times of Trouble" and the beginning of the Romanov's dynasty. They chose the particular date of November 4th. That's when the popular militia headed by Minin and Pozharsky-a merchant and a noble -breached the defenses of Moscow, which was occupied by Polish troops and their local collaborators, and took Kitai-Gorod (the Chinatown-there was such a thing even then).

The liberal media opposed the date from the start. Actually they oppose anything at all suggesting Russian pride, especially if it has to do with encounters with Western armies. The popular militia was a truly democratic, up-from-below movement organized by ordinary citizens themselves. It was a moment of truth comparable in American history to the Paul Revere's ride and the march of the Minutemen militia in Concord and Lexington against the British redcoats. This is exactly why it is hated by the liberal and much of the Western media-because it runs counter to their established line that Russian history is nothing but "a thousand years of slavery and autocracy." Some papers bitched that this new holiday would antagonize Poles (big deal, they built their own whole history around antagonizing Russians). The idiocy of political correctness went as far as claiming that it can't be celebrated because apparently some Jewish merchants in the Polish supply line were slaughtered in the ruckus.

Vladimir Vladimirovich

2005-11-17T17:29:00.000+03:00

No comments

I never expected that

2005-11-16T18:38:00.000+03:00

Amazing! If you google “how to drink and stay sober” my blog comes at the very top of the list. I’m Number One! But if you google “how to stay sober” you get a long list of rehab services, groups and clinics, together with religious sites.

Is Andre Glucksmann mad?

2005-11-15T15:45:00.000+03:00

Paris - French intellectuals have maintained their silence, despite more than 6,000 burnt-out cars, wrecked schools and vandalized creches and the one death resulting from the riots that have raged since October 27. Now at last the philosopher Andre Glucksmann has spoken out with a provocative thesis: The disturbances are not the result of alienation but a sign that the young rioters are becoming integrated. 'They are integrating themselves by the very act of setting cars alight, even by the fact that they are setting people alight,' he told the German newspaper, the Franfurter Rundschau. According to Glucksmann, negation is a typical form of French integration.

Actually this is a typical non sequitur. All cats like milk. John likes milk. Ergo - John is a cat.
For those who don't know - Andre Glucksmann is a Russophobe No.1 in Europe who sincerely believes that Russia in any form and under any government is a threat to the world.

Slightly edited Soviet poster - "Africa is fighting. Africa will win"

via ahom

Response to Anonim

2005-11-14T17:51:00.000+03:00

Anonim commented on my post “Why Russian students cheat”.

Are we living in the same country with you? In Russia I live in, you would never get into a good university or school without a bribe or connections.

The answer depends on what is meant by a “good” university or school. In Russia I live a good university is the one that gives your career a boost upon graduation. People who talk a lot about total bribery and corruption miss the fact that Russian employers are far from being na?ve or stupid. If you are an owner of a dental clinic, would you hire a dentist when you know that he got his degree at a corrupt university? Never! If you hear only once that dentistry students at the XYZ School of Medicine pay bribes for their grades, for your clinic their diplomas are not worth the paper they are printed on.

Serious employers are very scrupulous about the reputation of colleges they hire people from. For example, the receptionist at our office has a diploma magnum cum laude from, let’s say, Mukhosransk University. Although she personally was really a very good student the bad reputation of her school is her damnation now. If she were pickier about her school she wouldn’t be sitting here receiving and directing phone calls. On the other hand, job descriptions from the top Russian corporations often go, “Applicants with degrees other than from MFTI, MVTU or MIFI need not bother”. You see, these three schools are known for their impeccable reputation, so their degrees are worth at least five times more than a degree from Mukhosransk. It’s all about money, nothing personal. Employers need to filter applicants earlier before they prove their total incompetence. If the school is known to be corrupt, don’t expect to find a good job. Besides, security at serious companies doesn’t like people who solve their problems by giving bribes.

Go and talk to university students, they'll tell you that in many cases you can pass the exam by putting some money in your student's record book.

Two sons of my neighbor are currently students at MIFI. I asked them the question. The answer was “NEVER!” Although MIFI is a so-called engineers’ college (Moscow Physics Engineering Institute) its diplomas are welcomed everywhere. An average starting salary for a MIFI graduate is US$ 900. An oil company I worked for hired accountants and finance managers only from MIFI or MFTI even if they studied nuclear physics there. The rationale – a person who “survived” five years at MIFI can cope with a 2-year course of financial accounting in about two months. If you made it there, you make everywhere.

And what is so special about lecture-tutorial-lab srtucture? This is how it is done in the US too as far as I know.

You are wrong. Russian system is basically German albeit stemming from the 19th century. American system is basically British.

Moreover, there is much less opportunity for a professor to be biased towards a particular student, because it the exam is written, noone can say that a person who wrote it knows less, than what he wrote. And believe me, not many students in the US would risk being expelled by cheating or plagiarizing, which is a common practice in Russian universities.

You didn’t get an idea of my post. You also don’t need to say, “believe me” as I got my MBA in the US. As graduate students we were often allowed to “cheat”: open books exams or one library card “cheat sheet” (microscopes were not allowed). All in all, American examination system makes most of cheating methods useless. Just consider this – you have 3 hours to answer 50 multiple choice questions, 20 open questions and solve 10 problems. Where do you expect to hide your 600-pages cheat sheet?

Considering your age, you probably have not been able to fit into the present state of things and are still living in the communist past.

Aha! Now I see. First, you made a pre-supposition that I’m old and didn’t fit into the present state of things (whatever it means). Then using argumentae ad hominem tactics you decided that your blanket statements on total corruption of Russian educational system should be taken as logical. Your blanket might be well sized, but it covers only a part of the bed, as all global generalizations do.

It's sooo annoying that so many Russians use every opportunity to talk about how something in Russia is better than in America.

I recommend taking an anger management class not to be soooo annoyed. Particularly, when I didn’t say a word about Russian education being better than American. They are different with their unique pros and contras. I only tried to give a rational answer to the question why Russian students cheat.

McDonalds... Did we love it?

2005-11-07T19:31:00.000+03:00

I remember 15 years ago in January when the temperature was -15C me and my girlfriends spent almost two hours in line just to get inside McDonalds in Moscow. What idiots we were! Actually that was not McDonalds itself but a rare opportunity to test a "legendary" Big Mac - symbol of the West.

Some thoughts about McDonalds then and now read at Russian Marketing Blog.

Why Russian students cheat

2005-11-03T18:04:00.000+03:00

Jane Keeler raises an interesting topic on cheating at Russian universities. Some explanations should be added:

Almost all exams in Russia are oral. At the start of an exam first five or ten students enter the room where they pick randomly so called “billet” – question cards. A typical card includes two questions on theory and one or two “practice” problems. A student is given about half an hour to get ready and then for another twenty minutes the examiner and the student talk on the topics from the card. All cheating is done during the preparation phase of the exam. Although cheating is definitely illegal examiners usually wink at it. Reasons are simple:

1. The exam is oral so it doesn’t really matter if a student wrote down correct answers from cribs. Examiner can ask any number of questions and it’s very easy for him to prove that the student doesn’t know anything on the topic. It’s almost impossible to get a good grade cheating. The whole thing is just a somewhat hypocritical tribute to the 19th century traditions of university examinations. Nowadays many examiners allow students to bring textbooks and notes to exams and I think it’s a good idea.

2. Russian higher education system is “lecture – seminar – laboratory”. At lectures students listen, take notes and ask questions. Lectures are followed by seminars where they discuss with the same professor the topic of the previous lecture. This way the professor (=examiner) has plenty of time to get to know students. Long before the exam he knows who is good and who is bad. Students who skipped classes had no chances at the exam no matter how brilliantly they cheat. For Russian students it’s very important to be liked by professors – always asking smart questions, showing up good knowledge of professor’s books and articles, participating actively in discussions at seminars. But again even the best should work hard for exams. When a good student at the exams shows his ignorance it’s considered offensive. That’s real cheating! “Did you think I like you so much that you get A just by showing up at the exam?!”
3. Russian (or Soviet) higher education system puts a lot of pressure on students. Actually only the few are up to the mark. If you follow official standards than 80% of students should be kicked out immediately. Not that they are bad – standards are too high. This way Russian (Soviet) education system produced some A-students who were times better than their American or European counterparts and about 80% who were below average. And almost no one in the middle.