It has been a long time since anyone paid much attention to the Federation Council, the putative upper chamber of Russia’s legislature. Although its chairman, A Just Russia head Sergei Mironov (now on Twitter!), occasionally makes headlines for some odd statement or other, the body itself plays its role in Russia’s faux-democratic political system almost unnoticed.

But that doesn’t mean the Kremlin, the bureaucracy, and United Russia are ignoring it. As I said in an earlier post, this long quiet period in the valley between the peaks of national elections is exactly when some of the important changes are put into place that will produce the desired results when the next act of electoral theater is played out (Duma in 2011 and president in 2012).

It should be noted that the Federation Council long ago ceased to be an elected body. Under the Putin-era system, the council comprises two delegates from each federation subject, one supposedly representing the region’s legislative branch and one representing its executive branch. Of course, the regional legislatures are all in the stranglehold of United Russia and the governors have been appointed by the Kremlin since 2005, so the Federation Council has pretty much been turned into – well, we don’t usually like to cite Wikipedia, but… -- “a rubber-stamp body for the executive branch and the ruling United Russia party, similar to what the Soviet of Nationalities was during the Soviet period.”

But, theoretically, the council has some interesting powers. The council approves, for instance, a presidential decree of martial law or a state of emergency. It can – again, very theoretically – impeach the president. It also approves the use of the armed forces abroad, although the Kremlin recently made moves to weaken that control and allow the president to make such moves unilaterally (see August 2008).

And there have been some interesting moves recently that show the upper chamber is not off the radar. Regular readers of The Power Vertical will recall that in February, President Dmitry Medvedev appointed Natalya Komarova as governor of the oil-rich Khanty-Mansiisk Autonomous Okrug (“oil rich” is an understatement – the okrug produces more than half of all Russian oil). Before being sent into the wild, Komarova served as chairwoman of the Duma’s natural resources committee, where she cooperated closely with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin in handing out perks to the energy industry.

This week Komarova raised eyebrows by nominating Federal Security Service General Nikolai Fedoryak to be her representative in the upper chamber. The 60-year old lifetime security-services veteran has no connection of any sort with Khanty-Mansiisk and has recently been serving as deputy presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District. Last year he was being touted as a likely candidate to replace then-Volgograd Oblast Governor Nikolai Maksyuta. In fact, according to “Kommersant,” Komarova and Fedoryak had never met before United Russia arranged a meeting in late March to inform the governor that he was her man. Komarova’s press secretary told the daily that Fedoryak’s appointment makes sense because “a fresh view on the problems of the region is always good.”

(Interestingly, Fedoryak replaces Gennady Oleinik, a veteran of Khanty-Mansiisk politics who took on the utterly thankless job of heading the Federation Council’s Committee on the Far North and Small Minorities.)

Some may be wondering is this FSB general Putin’s man or Medvedev’s? After all, he served as the deputy presidential envoy to the Southern Federal District, so he must be one of the president’s men, right? Well, he picked up that post in 2004, under the last president. He told a 2009 conference on development in the North Caucasus that the region “in general doesn’t need to modernize – it has lived its own life for many centuries.” No modernization! What would Medvedev think?

Analysts have been speculating for some time that people who manage to get the Kremlin’s nod to become governor return the favor to those who lobbied for them with sinecures in the Federation Council. If Sechin, the leader of the hard-line siloviki faction within Putin’s entourage, was indeed Komarova’s patron, then her appointment of a nearing-retirement-age FSB general to the Federation Council would make sense.

On the other hand, the appointment seems to indicate that United Russia is taking a stronger interest in the Federation Council. The party, it would seem, does not trust its own governors (virtually all of Russia’s governors are United Russia members or supporters) to appoint senators who will push the party line (although, of course, the Federation Council is supposed to be made of people representing the subjects of the Russian Federation and its demise is the most obvious sign of the destruction of federalism under Putin).

Last month, the party’s political council compelled the Voronezh Oblast legislature to appoint as its representative in the Federation Council Duma Deputy Nikolai Olshansky, a mining oligarch. Olshansky, incidentally, is 71, so something had to be done with him. As local United Russia spokesman Igor Surovtsev told “Kommersant,” “his age, most likely, will make itself felt and the next Duma elections are not far off.” (Interesting side note, Olshansky’s son, Igor, died in November 2005 when the private Cessna plane in which he was returning from a hunting (poaching?) trip crashed.)

Also last month, Chelyabinsk Oblast Governor Mikhail Yurevich (who took office on April 22, replacing longtime Governor Pyotr Sumin) was forced by United Russia to name Ruslan Gattarov as his representative in the Federation Council. Gattarov is the head of United Russia’s Young Guard movement and, unlike Fedoryak and Olshansky, is just 33 years old. He became the third Young Guard leader – after Andrei Turchak and Aleksandr Borisov – to join the upper chamber. (You can watch him here on video complaining about migrant workers in Russia.) Political analyst Aleksandr Kynev says the success of the Young Guard in getting into the Federation Council attested to the influence of deputy presidential administration head Vladislav Surkov, who set up the ruling party’s youth organization.

In March, Primorsky Krai Governor Sergei Darkin unexpectedly and without explanation withdrew his candidate for the Federation Council and last month he named Interior Ministry General Vladimir Kikot, a nomination that also came directly from United Russia’s central organs. Kikot, 58, formerly headed the ministry’s personnel department and has no known connection to Primorsky Krai.

It seems most likely to me that he was viewed as an opponent of proposed personnel cuts in the ministry that have been proposed as part of the purported effort to combat police abuse or he stood to lose his post and was in need of a parachute. It would be interesting to know his role in the appointments of some of the many senior Interior Ministry figures that Medvedev has had to fire in recent months as one scandal after another made the headlines. As the Interior Ministry proceeds with its reforms, I think we can expect to see more and more siloviki from its ranks moving into other organs of power, state corporations, and the like (something like what happened to the KGB in the 1990s).

Primorsky Krai now has the distinction of being the only federation subject represented by two senators that have no connection whatsoever to the region: its legislature has been represented in the Federation Council by former hockey star and unofficial “sports minister” Vyacheslav Fetisov since 2008. However, according to local media in Vladivostok, “in a year and a half, Primorsky Krai lawmakers haven’t noticed any activity on his part in defending the region’s interests.”

Vladivostok-based analyst Pyotr Khanas describes these appointments as “spitting in the direction of the president.” “During his last address to the Federal Assembly, Dmitry Medvedev talked about the necessity of democratizing the processes for forming the Federation Council, and particularly about the need to nominate candidates exclusively from the ranks of regional or municipal legislators. A bill to this effect has already been presented to the State Duma. But it appears the bureaucrats are in no hurry to realize the president’s vision and are trying as much as possible to secure their own interests in the upper chamber before any possible reform.”

-- Robert Coalson

A few days ago, fellow Power Verticalist Brian Whitmore gave the rundown on a bill the government has submitted to the Duma that would give the Federal Security Service (FSB) the authority to take “preventative measures” against individuals and organizations whose activities they think might lead to the commission of a crime, particularly the promotion of “extremism.”

Today, former assistant to Boris Yeltsin and INDEM foundation head Georgy Satarov has an interesting analysis of what the government’s thinking might be in calling for such an, excuse the pun, extreme measure. Satarov’s analysis is particularly interesting because he has gotten a hold of the “explanatory note” that the government submitted together with the bill, in which it lays out its “reasoning.”(If you read Russian, it is worth going through the whole piece, because I’ll only hit a couple of highlights here. Also, you can read the text of the government's letter and the text of the bill itself on the Duma's website by following the links on this page.)

First, Satarov mentions that the bill is directed against “the actions of people that facilitate the appearance of reasons or the creation of circumstances for the commission of a crime.” Under the bill, Satarov speculates, the FSB could theoretically take “preventative measures” against the Duma for passing a law that creates opportunities for corruption. Or it could go after the president for signing such a law or the government for enforcing it…. By such logic, the FSB could act preemptively against minorities for creating the conditions under which some neo-Nazi skinheads might want to beat them up. Jews could be harassed for inciting anti-Semitism by being Jewish. Police officers could be arrested for provoking violent anarchists.

Even more interestingly, Satarov notes that the explanatory note for the law claims that “the activity of radical organizations is leading to the growth of social tension and a strengthening of negative processes in society, especially among youths.” Satarov adds that the theme of youths runs through the document “like a red thread,” perhaps giving a hint about the real purpose of the bill. His dissection of this bit of the FSB’s logic is worth quoting at length:
 

They are trying to persuade us that “the activization of the activity of radical organizations” is the cause of social instability and the strengthening of negative tendencies in society. Next they’ll be telling us that the wind is caused by the movement of tree branches. But the scariest thing is that they might really think this way themselves. When I was a presidential assistant, I systematically read the analyses of various agencies, and the most talentless and useless ones came from the FSB. It doesn’t seem to occur to them (and they definitely don’t want it to ever occur to us!) that social tension is rooted in the constantly increasing gap between rich and poor, in bureaucratic unaccountability from which there is no protection, and many other miracles produced by the practices of the authorities, of whom the author of the document is a member. We might also mention their efforts to inculcate xenophobia, chauvinism, and great-power arrogance. They are the ones who encourage the demonstrations of fascists and forbid the protests of democrats.

The government’s explanatory note also argues that the law is needed because “certain mass-media organs, both print and electronic, are openly facilitating the formation of negative processes in the spiritual sphere, reinforcing the cult of individualism and violence and doubt about the ability of the state to defend its citizens, de facto drawing youths into extremist activity.” That is, we can expect this conveniently vague measure to be used against mass media as the country approaches the next national elections (Duma deputies! Pass this law and save your seats!). As I noted in my last post here, this bill will work very nicely with another government initiative to bring blogs and other Internet publications under the umbrella of the mass-media law.

Next, Satarov takes note of the government’s admission in the explanatory document that “despite the organizational and legal measure that have been implemented in recent years…the number of crimes against lives and health committed on the basis of extremist-nationalistic convictions is not decreasing.”

Satarov then enumerates the “organizational and legal measures” the government has taken in recent years: cancelling gubernatorial elections; abolishing elections in general as an institution of honest political competition; the introduction of restrictive laws on the activity of public organizations; the expansion of the definition of extremism to include anything that the government doesn’t like; the restriction of the institution of jury trials; the unprecedented growth of corruption; and the unconvincing imitation of a war against corruption. And now, this new bill – or, to quote Monty Python, now for something completely different.

Satarov ends his analysis by noting that the FSB is one of the government agencies that is directly subordinate to the president. He therefore notes that it is more than passing strange that this bill to amend the law on the FSB came from the government and bears the prime minister’s signature. Hmmm.

-- Robert Coalson

There is a timeless bit of Russian folk wisdom that says you should prepare your sled in the summer and your cart in the winter. In accordance with this adage, now is the time for the Kremlin to be preparing for the 2011-12 national-election cycle that will install a new Duma and culminate in a presidential election. And there are plenty of signs that that is exactly what is going on.

For one thing, in March it was announced that Central Election Commission head Vladimir Churov had been assigned a shadowy former official from the presidential administration’s task force on domestic politics (“the managed-democracy team”) named Mikhail Berulava whose task is to “organize the process of forming new territorial and precinct [election] commissions for the parliamentary and presidential elections of 2011-12.” Considering that Berulava worked for the Kremlin for more than a decade (is he Dmitry Medvedev’s man, as the press speculated in March, or is he Vladimir Putin’s? Does it matter?), very little has been written about him over the years. The main thing I have been able to dig up is that he managed to get his father into the Public Chamber, supposedly as the representative of some grassroots organization called the Public Movement to Support the Policies of the President.

Second, as Power Verticalista Brian Whitmore wrote yesterday, the government has submitted legislation to the Duma that would allow the Federal Security Service to take “preventative measures” against individuals it suspects of “extremism.” Observers have been quick to note that from the government’s point of view, the main “extremists” in Russia are political opponents.

Even the loyal opposition in the Duma has come out strongly against the proposal -- A Just Russia Deputy Gennady Gudkov said it would revive “a Soviet-era practice that was used against dissidents” and so on. That is a fairly strong indicator that it is likely this fairly Draconian idea was floated so that Russia’s liberal president could come out against it. But it doesn’t really matter whether the law is adopted, since as Moscow Helsinki Group Chairwoman Lyudmila Alekseyeva told RFE/RL, “our FSB has already long ago moved beyond the framework of any law.”

Finally, the Russian version of “Newsweek” this week has a thorough rundown of the latest Kremlin moves regarding the Internet. (In addition to the bits mentioned below, the article has a nice graphic on who owns the runet and a summary of major anti-blogger legal cases over the last couple of years.)

It has been noted for some time now that the new media are increasingly setting a social and political agenda that runs counter to the narrative in the state-controlled media. For instance, former police Major Aleksei Dymovsky posted a scathing indictment of police corruption on YouTube late last year that fed a firestorm of criticism directed at the Interior Ministry. A video of veteran rocker Yury Shevchuk railing against the “brutal, cruel, and inhumane” system that has emerged in Russia went viral in March. An online petition calling for the release of former Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina last year was credited with helping secure her freedom. Russian drivers have kept their various protests alive via the Internet for ages now. Nearly 40,000 people have now signed on to an online petition calling for Putin’s resignation. And so on.

While none of this amounts to an existential threat to the ruling order, it clearly is a loose end that must be tidied up before election monitors descend to assess Medvedev’s democratic credentials.

“Newsweek” says the Kremlin realizes that it can’t adopt “the Chinese model” and crudely block Internet access. It also realizes it doesn’t need to. Instead, the administration is preparing some tried-and-true tactics. Managed democracy calls for a managed Internet, clearly.

The magazine reports that a bill is in the works that would equate blogs and individual Internet pages with mass-media organs, and make them subject to the same regulations that have largely defanged Russia’s traditional media.

Such anti-blogger legislation could fit in nicely with the proposed expansion of FSB powers. “Now the noise surrounding [the abuse of flashing lights on the cars of officials and state business executives] has the Kremlin more frightened than any terrorist acts,” an unnamed source close to the presidential administration told the weekly. “They all understand that the middle class, using Internet platforms, has completely broken loose.”

“Newsweek” also reports that the government is preparing to spend $100 million to create a Kremlin-controlled search engine. It is unclear whether that is a serious initiative or just a tactic to pressure current search engines operating in Russia to cooperate more freely with the authorities. The article gives many examples of Kremlin pressure on Yandex and cites an unnamed Yandex source as saying, “at Yandex people are just tired of getting calls from the Kremlin after the appearance of every bit of top news in the blogs.”

As Internet penetration in Russia keeps growing (it reached 20 percent last year, with 51 percent of urban residents over age 18 reporting they are online), it is clear that managing democracy without managing the Internet will become increasingly problematic. According to “Newsweek,” when cabinet minister came to Putin in 1999 with a proposal to bring online publications under the mass media law, Putin reportedly responded negatively and declared the Internet “a zone of administrative freedom.”

But that was then, and this is now.

-- Robert Coalson

Reports of Russian police corruption and human rights abuses have been a daily occurrence for a long time now. The litany of outrages has become so ardent and so insistent that President Dmitry Medvedev has been forced to intervene personally on numerous occasions. Just last month, he fired a few senior Interior Ministry officials and sternly ordered Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev to come up with a new plan for battling police corruption within a month.

In fact, that order came on February 18, which means, Rashid, time’s up! Pencils down. Let’s see what you’ve got. Actually, Nurgaliyev seems to have given himself an extension. In an interview with “Moskovsky komsomolets” published today, he says he has until April 1 to stitch something together.

“A lot of work is going on,” Nurgaliyev says. “We are preparing a new law on the police and are carrying out work on personnel questions and the optimization of work.”

One wonders whether his new law on the police will incorporate his recent, incredible suggestion that citizens strike back at police who abuse them and violate their rights. After all, Nurgaliyev said in a strangely Orwellian formula, “we are all equal and a citizen is doubly equal.”

But today’s “Moskovsky komsolets” interview is revealing in other ways too and casts considerable doubt on whether Nurgaliyev is really the right person to be working on this reform project at all.

“Our meeting took place in the minister’s office at Zhitnaya 16,” the article begins. “And the context was a press announcement claiming that the minister had been given the Golden Toilet Brush award by a youth organization for mindless state expenditures. The press release claimed that the minister had furnished his office with a super armchair and other new items for some 25 million rubles.”

But is the report true? As the MK reporter notes, “the head of the Interior Ministry showed his office, in which practically nothing had changed since Soviet times.” (Actually, to be fair to the Golden Toilet Brush folks, their press release says Nugaliyev authorized the purchases for "the ministry," not for his personal office. Maybe they should look in his house...)

But anyway, that’s a quotation worth repeating – “practically nothing had changed since Soviet times.”

“And I haven't been given any toilet brush,” Nurgaliyev is quoted as saying. “On the contrary, when I came to the ministry, I decided not to change anything. The spirit of my predecessors is preserved here and that creates a certain working atmosphere.”

That’s worth repeating too – “I decided not to change anything.” “The spirit of my predecessors is preserved here.”

Sounds like a great reformer.

Nurgaliyev goes on to suggest that a lot of the Interior Ministry’s woes are due to the “fact” that it has “become the most open state agency and we don’t hide our shortcomings and problems from the public.”

The interviewer tries to wind up the conversation with a soft-ball question, but Nurgaliyev blows even that one. Asked what he is reading right now, he says: “I found a bound volume of the 1959 issues of the magazine ‘Soviet Police.’ And there is a lot of interesting and useful stuff there that can be used today.”

Nurgaliyev’s April 1 plan to reform the Interior Ministry is beginning to look more and more like it’ll be the best April Fool’s joke of the year.

P.S. As I was posting this, kasparov.ru came across with a report of a discussion of police reform that was sponsored by the Public Chamber today. At that meeting, A Just Russia Duma Deputy Gennady Gudkov made the reasonable suggestion (in fact, it is so obvious that it is hard to believe anyone had to make it) that it doesn't make sense to put the Interior Ministry in charge of reforming itself, as Medvedev has done. But the really interesting part was the response from United Russia Deputy Vladimir Vasilyev. Vasilyev said that all the reporting on police abuses and corruption were like "whipping a child": "If you whip a child every day, he never grows up." And then, revealling the ruling elite's contempt for the Russian public, he said the population of Russia "is a dangerous contingent inclined toward breaking the law." Incredible.

-- Robert Coalson

Readers of this blog will know that we have taken a skeptical view of Vladimir Putin’s lofty popularity ratings in Russia. For many years it was standard to report that about three-quarters of Russians express support for Putin without analyzing the context of Russia’s “managed” political system.

In December 2008, I wrote a post dissecting Putin’s popularity and attempting to explain how tenuous it was (actually, that post was based on an analysis I wrote during the December 2007 Duma election campaign). I wrote that “Putin’s popularity ratings are a bubble that exists within a political vacuum, a bubble that nonetheless needs to be continuously pumped up with injections of hot air from state television.” (I took a certain amount of flak for this position (or is it a "senile rant"?), such as here.)

The Levada Center, which does the most reliable polling within this artificial political vacuum (recording the level of created popularity for Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, not their actual popularity in any open-society terms), shows that Putin’s popularity rating is holding fairly steady at about 80 percent: From January to February it rose from 78 to 80 percent. The popularity of the government that he heads stood at 58 percent in January 2009 and was 54 percent last month.

Interestingly, the number of Russians who believe the country is on the right course, according to Levada, is 48 percent (up from 43 percent in January 2009). As you can see, the Kremlin’s propaganda machine understandably has a much easier time inflating the ratings of concrete individuals than it does manufacturing support for more abstract notions like the “government” and various policies.

Even that 48 percent stating they think the country is moving in the right direction is clearly overstated, given other Levada Center findings such as that 94 percent of Russians feel they have no influence over what happens in Russia, one-third are worried about human rights abuses, 68 percent say they don’t feel protected by the law, and only 4 percent say they feel their property is secure.

The Kremlin propaganda machine, of course, does not just give – it also takes away. It is very skilled at marginalizing people. No one remembers, for instance, that Mikhail Kasyanov was Putin’s trusted prime minister for nearly four years, but all Russians “remember” that he was known as “Misha 5 2 Percent” for his alleged and never proven (even in Russia’s controlled judicial system) corruption [NOTE: The nickname Misha 2 Percent has been corrected from the original post. Thanks to the reader who pointed out the error]. Pro-Kremlin analysts love to claim that people like Garry Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, Vladimir Milov, and Andrei Illarionov are “nobodies” – without acknowledging that they have been systematically and purposely marginalized.

Recently, noted and tireless human rights advocate Sergei Kovalyov (former Duma deputy, former Russian human rights ombudsman, heir to the legacy of Andrei Sakharov, etc,) celebrated his 80th birthday – and the Kremlin PR machine could celebrate too, as a Levada Center poll found that 83 percent of Russians had never heard of him. Airbrushed out of the picture.

But I digress. Getting back to Putin, although his popularity rating is holding steady at about 80 percent, there are tantalizing indications that that could begin changing. RFE/RL’s Russian Service spoke to Moscow-based journalist and political analyst Leonid Radzikhovsky, who explained:

As far as Putin is concerned, his authority in the country remains greater than Medvedev’s. And his popularity rating is substantially higher than that of any democratic leader in the West – Obama or Sarkozy. Incidentally, it only takes firing all barrels of television for a couple of weeks and throw out just some of the kompromat on Putin and his rating would plummet. But the interesting thing is whether the Internet campaign under the slogan ‘Fire Putin’ arose spontaneously or was organized from higher up. Or are the authorities just allowing it to happen. Or are they powerless to stop it? There are no answers to these questions.

Asked for his personal opinion on these important questions, Radzikhovsky answered:

There has been no direct order from Medvedev’s entourage to launch an attack against Putin, of course. But it is a fact that they are turning a blind eye to something that half a year ago they wouldn’t have tolerated. Over the last 11 years, a significant amount of discontent with Putin has accumulated, even if you don’t look too deeply at his activities. And now there is also the [global economic] crisis. But it is unlikely that these moods could have been converted into real political activities against Putin.

Radzikhovsky also rightly warns against thinking that the political balance between Putin and Medvedev is a zero-sum game:
 

There is no such connection here that what is a loss for Putin is a gain for Medvedev. There is an entirely different problem. If Putin’s authority crashes down, then Medvedev’s authority will crumble right down with it. So if Medvedev – let’s imagine for a moment – is calculating that if he gets Putin down to zero then he will be lifted up, that is a fatal mistake. Without Putin, particularly if he falls precipitously, Medvedev, of course, can’t survive.

As much as I hate to advise this, I’d say that now is a very good time to watch Russian state television closely. Not that I’d expect to see them let loose with the kompromat on Putin any time soon, but it will be interesting to see if they scale back on efforts to lionize him. Merely doing that would be sufficient to let the air out of his balloon, although I agree with Radzikhovsky that doing so is politically suicidal for Medvedev.

One indication that we might see something like this is the strange silence of Nashi. Remember the proto-fascist youth movement that brought us the For Putin! Movement and Walking Together and so on and so on? Remember back when came out in the hundreds of thousands in their matching Putin t-shirts and practically anointed him the national leader? They have been strangely silent as the anti-Putin Internet campaign has unfolded. They keep holding tiny protests about supposedly anti-Russian activities in the Baltic States and they protested against McDonald’s in the wake of the Vancouver Olypmics – but when protesters go after Putin directly, they have nothing to say? This is more than a little strange.

As Radzikhovsky says, “they are turning a blind eye to something that half a year ago they wouldn’t have tolerated.” Will that be reflected on Russia’s television screens? And will we see that 80 percent popularity rating begin to descend toward reality? Stay tuned.

P.S. I’d estimate that Putin’s real popularity rating – if such a thing can even be said to exist in Russia’s managed political environment – is about 40-45 percent. This, of course, is remarkably high for someone who has held power for more than a decade. However, I also think that rating would fall very quickly in an atmosphere of real political competition. That is, the rating is inflated not only by propaganda, but also by the suppression of all political alternatives. Russians (like everyone else, I guess) fear chaos, so Putin’s “popularity” benefits enormously as long as occupies the political stage all alone.

-- Robert Coalson

Gazeta.ru today published a nice little analysis of the problems of small and medium-size business owners in Kaliningrad. The goal of the piece is to lay out the real reasons for the large demonstration that took place in the exclave in January and which many took as a sign that the endless patience of the Russian people was nearing its end.

The piece is based on information from Kaliningrad Oblast legislator Igor Rudnikov, who participated in the meetings that led up to the protest. He notes that it was precisely the oblast’s many small business owners who formed the nucleus of the protest, reporting that small and medium-sized business accounts for some 70 percent of the oblast’s GDP. There are some 12,000 small businesses there, mostly tiny retail sales outlets.

Rudnikov reports that the owners have been in the grips of local bureaucrats for years now. Since 1994, they have been forced to secure fresh approval from the city administration for “the right to setup a small-business point.” The city administration charges from $100 to $2,000 for such permission, plus business owners must conclude separate arrangements with other bureaucracies such as the fire and health inspectorates.

Every two months. Since 1994.

Rudnikov writes that the “business” was so good for the officials that the city had to set up a municipal enterprise called Municipal Property, where more than 70 bureaucrats do nothing more than stamp the permissions six times a year and collect the fees.

But that’s not what brought people into the streets. What made people upset was when the city decided that all small businesses would have to pay 15,000 euros to buy a specially designed uniform kiosk from a specific supplier. The local business association said they’d go along with this scheme, but only if officials started issuing three-year business permissions instead of the two-month ones.

That was when the protests began last summer, which attracted the attention of Kaliningrad Oblast Governor Georgy Boos. He arranged a roundtable meeting of officials and business representatives at which it was agreed that businesses would be given three years to decide whether to buy the 15,000 euro kiosks. If they choose to do so, they would be given permission to work for another seven years. That is, the state would guarantee their right to trade for 10 years if they invested the 15,000.

But the agreement never made it to the city council. It sat inside the city administration and languished. Boos organized another meeting at which city bureaucrats said “they hadn’t had time to get all the necessary approvals because some people have been sick and others were on vacation and there just isn’t enough staff.” (Does this remind anyone of the British sitcom “Yes, Minister”?)

Boos reportedly demanded that the new system be in place and that, instead of giving businesses that make the investment permission for another seven years, they be given a green light for a full 25. Anyone can see how the corrupt officials would like that idea.

So, Rudnikov says, they determined to stall the agreement until September, when Boos’s current term expires and it may or may not be possible to lobby the Kremlin to have him removed.

The story continues with more about the customs regime in the oblast and how competitors from other regions very likely influenced Moscow customs officials to level crippling fees against Kaliningrad factories.

The upshot is that businesspeople in the region are at a loss regarding protests. Demonstrating for benefits or tax breaks or special trade status means, in reality, demonstrating for the right of bureaucrats to determine who gets such benefits and who does not.

“The main lesson of Kaliningrad is this,” the gazeta.ru article concludes. “At a certain moment in a certain country two absolutely antithetical forces collided – small and medium-sized business on the one hand and the bureaucracy on the other. The goal of business is logical and traditional – to earn money and the more, the better. But the goal of the bureaucracy in Russia is not to advance one’s career, but money – by extorting business. Major corporations live under the terms of concrete agreements with the authorities – the larges ones work directly with deputy prime ministers. That means that the main source of income for the bureaucracy is small and medium-sized business. This is not unique to Kaliningrad. But 70 percent of the GDP there comes from this sector. And that’s why the explosion happened there.”

-- Robert Coalson

If the regional elections in Russia had been normal elections, the results would be easy to interpret. The ruling United Russia party lost about 20 percentage points of support more or less across the board, despite the kinds of gross election violations that have become the norm. Many analysts, including the astute Aleksandr Kynev, interpreted the outcome as “catastrophic” for the ruling party and a sign of a “fundamental” shift in the public mood.

Here’s a bit of what he wrote on gazeta.ru today:

If you look at the voting and the run-up to it, then it is plain that the same problems that were noted in earlier elections were evident – that is, elections themselves have not gotten any cleaner. As before, there was pressure on state-sector workers and manipulation of absentee voting and early voting (despite all the declarations about this that have come from the federal level) – even in areas where there were scandals earlier, such as Astrakhan and Sochi. Some of the most well-known examples from recent days are the voluntary-compulsory mass early voting of students in Ivanovo; bribing and handing out drinks in Tula; and reports that whole brigades of people with absentee ballots were forced to report to their bosses with photographs of their properly marked ballots in Ryazan, Sverdlovsk, and Voronezh oblasts.

And on and on. (The local election commission in Sochi last week posted a video appeal to President Dmitry Medvedev complaining of gross violations in early voting and asking him to invalidate the entire early-voting process in the region.)

Nonetheless, Kynev argues, the results show that even the gross abuse of administrative resources could not hold up United Russia’s sagging fortunes. He notes that in most regions, United Russia managed only a plurality – that is, the total vote for the other parties was greater than the ruling party’s result.

But not so fast. In terms of actual seats, United Russia has almost certainly secured majorities in all eight regional legislatures that were contested, due in large measure to the fact that most Russian regions had already – under United Russia-controlled legislatures – adopted mandate-apportioning systems that are heavily skewed toward the leading vote-getter (the so-called Imperiali divisors). This was the system that gave United Russia 91 percent of  the seats (31 of 35) in the Moscow City Duma in October after polling (or being awarded by the municipal election commission) 66 percent of the vote during the elections last October.

In addition, the newly elected regional legislatures will all feature the same four parties that have factions in the State Duma – United Russia, A Just Russia, the Communist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR). Other parties that are not reliably in the Kremlin’s pocket – Yabloko, Right Cause, Patriots of Russia – were systematically eliminated at the campaign stage.

It should be recalled that in the regional elections in October, United Russia showed a huge and inexplicable jump in support and in some regions, such as the Moscow City Duma, ended up practically alone in the legislative chamber.

This prompted President Dmitry Medvedev – although he never disputed the official results of the October voting and rejected all the well-documented evidence of illegality and falsification – to make a lot of nice-sounding declarations about how political competition needs to increase and so on.

Now – voila! – we have results that the casual observer could easily mistake for a great leap forward in democracy. If, that is, one ignores the fact that United Russia-controlled legislatures will continue to work in tandem with Kremlin-appointed, United Russia-controlled governors in every region of Russia.

It is true that discontent is rising and the waves of protests over economic issues, as well as the outrage that is mounting as more and more police abuses are revealed, are very real -- and a real concern in Moscow. These elections could be a way of responding to that discontent with the goal of defusing the protests. They also further institutionalize the pseudo-opposition (pro-Kremlin media today are hyping the idea that the anti-United Russia “protest vote” went to the other three pro-Kremlin parties) on the stage of Russia’s political theater, providing cover for the continued intentional marginalization of genuinely alternative political forces.

Furthermore, the real context of these elections is the next wave of national elections. The Duma will be elected in 2011 and a presidential election will follow in March 2012. We know the Kremlin is already actively working on this problem – just last week it was reported that a longtime former presidential administration official has been appointed to the administration of the Central Election Commission to oversee the formation of regional election commissions for the upcoming votes.

The ruling elite’s levers and mechanisms for ensuring who participates in elections, what the turnout is, and what the final results are seem to be as finely honed and precisely functioning as ever.  In past elections, the Kremlin has always managed to get the results it wanted. Is there really any reason to think that has changed now?

-- Robert Coalson

Citizens of Russia! The recognition that the ruling elite has led our country into a historical dead end has prompted us to issue this statement.

The transfer of virtually unlimited power by the [Yeltsin-era] Family, which was trying to guarantee its own security, to a man of dubious reputation who was distinguished neither by talent nor by the requisite life or professional experience has resulted predictably in the serious degradation of all institutions of state governance.

Even a significant portion of the ruling “elite” feels that a change is necessary, as attested by the loud reaction to [President Dmitry Medvedev’s] opus “Forward, Russia!” But Medvedev’s modernization project bears a distinctly artificial character and is aimed at a single goal – to redo the decorations while maintaining the nature of an authoritatian-kleptocratic regime.

We state that the sociopolitical construction that is killing Russia and has now bound the citizens of our country has one architect, one custodian, and one guardian. His name is Vladimir Putin.

We declare that no essential reforms can be carried out in Russia today as long as Putin controls real power in the country.

We declare that the dismantling of the Putin regime and the return of Russia to the path of democratic development can only begin when Putin has been deprived of all levers of managing the state and society.

We declare that during the years of his rule, Putin has become the symbol of corrupt and unpredictable country that is pitiless in its treatment of its own citizenry. It is a country in which citizens have no rights and are for the most part in poverty. It is a country without ideals and without a future.

If, as the Kremlin propagandists love to repeat, Russia was on its knees during the Yeltsin period, then Putin and his minions have pushed its face into the filth.

In the filth of the authorities’ contempt we find not only individual rights and freedoms, but human life itself as well.

In the filth of a false and feeble imitation of political and social institutions – from the bureaucratic phantom of United Russia to the Nazi-like Putin Youth.

In the filth of soul- and mind-warping televised obscurantism that is turning one of the most educated nations in the world into a soulless, amoral mob.

In the filth of total thievery and corruption emanating from the very pinnacle of Russian power. If not for the years in which Putin roamed the galleries of the Kremlin, the billionaires of his inner circle –Abramovich, Timchenko, the Kovalchuks, Rotenberg – would not exist. Nor would the parasitical state corporations of his friends – these black holes of the Russian economy.

Having begun his rise to power with the epical statement about “wiping them out in their outhouses,” Putin over the course of nearly 11 years has used this universal “tool” of ruling the country, and it has proven particularly effective in regard to his political opponents and business competitors.

Any political, social, or economic dissent is immediately suppressed: in the best cases, by administrative restrictions, but often by the bully clubs of the riot police, by criminal prosecution, by physical violence, and even by murder. Putin has proven that he is willing to destroy his personal opponents by any means available.

During the time that Putin has been at the pinnacle of state power, everything that could be ruined has been ruined. Pension and administrative reforms have been undone. There has been no reform of the armed forces, the secret services, or the law enforcement and judicial systems. The health-care system remains in its previous, pathetic condition.

The decline of education and science, which has been farmed out to the Ozero cooperative group, has reached the point where the “titans” of Russian scientific thought must be considered people like Petrik and Gryzlov.

Ten whole years have been lost – years when a boom in hydrocarbon and metals prices could have been used to modernize the country and carry out a structural reorganization of the economy. That is why the blow of the global economic crisis hit Russia so mercilessly, and it is far from over for us.

Having been named prime minister by Yeltsin, Putin not only was unable to correct the fatal mistakes made by his predecessors and put out the flames in the Caucasus, but his policies managed to raise that conflict to a new level that is capable of destroying the integrity of the country.

The “Kursk,” the Nord-ost theater, Beslan, the tens of thousands who died in the internecine second Cacasus war, the thousands who have lost their lives in infrastructure disasters, who burned in homes for the elderly and the handicapped that were unfit for human habitation, the dozens of murdered journalists and human rights activists and political opponents of the regime, and the ordinary victims of sadistic police lawlessness – these are the gravestones of the years of Putin’s rule.

These are the unexposed secrets of the Putin regime: the [1999] entry of [Shamil] Basayev into Daghestan; the explosions of apartment buildings in Moscow and Volgodonsk; the so-called training exercise in Ryazan.

People have long since stopped being surprised by Putin’s incapacity for strategic thinking. He is unable to see what the world will be like in 10-15 years and what place Russia can and must occupy in it. He is not capable of evaluating the real threats and risks facing the country, and that means he is in no position to correctly plan possible moves or identify potential allies and rivals.

A clear illustration of these short-sighted polices are the recent surrender agreements with China, in which Putin lightly erased the Russian Far East and Siberia off the map.

Further evidence of Putin’s lack of understanding of the future is his maniacal passion to build gas and oil pipelines in all thinkable and unthinkable directions; his initiation of expensive, ambitious projects (like the Sochi Olympics and the bridge to Russian Island), which are absolutely wrong for a country in which a large portion of the population lives below the poverty line.

Having temporarily moved form the presidential chair to the prime minister’s offices and having left in the Kremlin an obedient placeholder who is “of the same blood” – a modern Simeon Bekbulatovich – Putin has created an openly unconstitutional construction for governing the country for life.

It is obvious that Putin will never voluntarily relinquish power in Russia. His fierce intention to rule for life is no longer based on a thirst for power itself so much as on the fear of being held responsible for what he has done. For the Russian people, this is humiliating. But for the country it is fatally dangerous to have a ruler like Putin. This is a cross that Russia can bear no longer.

As the Putin grouping feels it the ground falling from under its feet, it could at any moment move from targeted repression to mass repression. We are warning law enforcement and security agency officers not to stand against their nation, not to carry out criminal orders from corrupt officials when they send you out to kill us for Putin, Sechin, and Deripaska.

Now the national demand at demonstrations from Vladivostok to Kaliningrad must be the call “Putin Must Go!” Ridding ourselves of Putinism is the first, obligatory step on the path to a new, free Russia.
 

-- Robert Coalson

As Brian Whitmore noted yesterday, some people in Russia’s arts community are taking some brave public stands against the authorities. Rocker Yury Shevchuk ended his concert tirade with a strong appeal for action: “Everything depends on you. The type of song you sing determines what kind of country we will have. Everything is in your hands, guys.”

And popular actor Aleksei Devotchenko has a similar "get-off-your-asses" message for Russia's cultural elite. He has posted on his blog an appeal to artists around the country to stop being so servile. It is a bold statement that will undoubtedly spell the end of his official career in Russia. And it is worth translating in full:
 

Can We Do Anything?

Dear friends and colleagues, actors, musicians, artists! On March 20 in many Russian cities there will be a national protest action against the criminal, deeply depraved, and cynical regime that was established in our country 10 years ago. Many of us, I think, support the demands and arguments that will be voiced on March 20. But at the same time we are shrugging our shoulders: “Can we do anything? Should we also go out into the streets?”

I believe it is a personal choice for everyone whether to go out or not. After all, doing so is by no means obligatory. Some will feel the urge to do so and others won’t. We are all different in terms of our convictions, our temperaments, our psychological and physical makeup. But there are things that can unite us in our drive to resist the shameful situation that has taken shape in Russia. Understanding fully the naivety of my suggestions, I nonetheless present them here. What can people who have tied their fates to art and culture do?

Refuse to take part in scenes in ultra-patriotic, propagandistic, chauvinistic, anti-Semitic, or pro-Stalinist feature films and television projects;

Refuse to take part in recording soundtracks for semi-official, agitprop documentaries and clips;

Refuse to participate in any theatricized celebrations organized by the Kremlin, St. Petersburg’s city hall, the United Russia party, and so on;

Refuse to participate in any broadcasts by the lying and tendentious television channels Channel One, Rossiya, NTV, or Moscow’s TV Tsentr;

Refuse to show up at high-society receptions and banquets attended by “public servants”;

Refuse to take part in government shows at all levels and, even more importantly, in the corporate celebrations of such monsters as the Federal Security Service, the Interior Ministry, LUKoil, Gazprom, and so on;

Refuse to participate in ceremonies to congratulate governors and mayors on their birthdays, anniversaries, on the births of grandchildren, and so on;

Refuse to give interviews to pro-Putin/Medvedev print media.

This list, of course, could go on. Of course, many of you will ask: “How are we going to earn a living? You know what they pay in theaters that aren’t servile to the authorities.” I know – 7,000 to 10,000 rubles a month maximum. I also know that for 10 minutes at some sort of Kremlin party you can earn as much as you’d make working in a theater for a year. I also know that many of you will shrug and say, “Money doesn’t stink.” Well, I think this money DOES stink – it smells of dank prison cells, of neglected hospitals and homeless shelters, of the acrid smoke of burnt-out architectural monuments and historical buildings and night clubs and homes for the elderly. It smells of the boots of the OMON riot police.

As for earning money…. There are many honest, professional means and this isn’t a secret to anyone. You can earn your way with solo concert programs; you can create original plays based on high dramaturgy that has been tested by time; you can appear in films that have no ideological or propagandistic subtext; you can take part in radio productions or the dubbing of foreign films, although this work is getting scarce.

Excuse me, please, for taking the liberty of writing all this, but God knows it is not a declaration or a manual for action. It is just my (and only my) personal appeal to everyone among us in the cultural sphere.

And maybe we can answer the banal and trite Soviet-era question, “Whose side are you on, Mr. Master of Culture?” A master of culture is always on the side of his audience, of his culture, and of his conscience. Thank you for your attention. For Your Freedom; For Our Freedom.

Of course, many prominent Russian cultural figures from filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov to sculptor Zurab Tsereteli long ago threw in their lot with the Putin government and its ideology. In March 2005, in the wake of Ukraine's Orange Revolution, RFE/RL's "Newsline" ran this item:
 

Deputy presidential-administration head Vladislav Surkov earlier this month held a closed-door meeting with leading Russian rock musicians, during which he asked them not to participate in events that could provoke "an orange revolution" in Russia, "The Moscow Times" reported on 31 March. Some participants in the meeting, which took place at a Moscow hotel, told the daily that Surkov, the Kremlin's chief ideologue, did not conceal his concern that Russia could see a repetition of recent events in Ukraine, where rock musicians played an important role in rallying Ukrainian youth in support of the Orange Revolution. Surkov said the authorities would like to be able to count on the support of the musicians, but added that they should at least remain neutral in the event of an uprising, "The Moscow Times" reported. Prominent rock stars Boris Grebenshchikov, Sergei Shnurov, Vyacheslav Butusov, and Zemphira attended the meeting, according to the daily. Meanwhile, on 29 March, Surkov told a meeting of the Unified Russia Duma faction that he "is categorically opposed to the introduction of a parliamentary system in Russia, as it could lead to the disintegration of the country," newsru.com reported.

Now lines are being drawn, and Russian artists are being asked again whether Russia wants "A Man Like Putin." Perhaps Western entertainers, like President Dmitry Medvedev's beloved Deep Purple or Scorpians, will have to make choices too.

-- Robert Coalson

An armored Mercedes in Moscow speeds down a busy highway and smashes into another car. The two women in the unfortunate car are killed. The police blame them and, by all appearances, hasten to cover up the evidence (RFE/RL’s story of the accident and the public outcry around it is here in English; Russian Service coverage is here).

But who was in the speeding car with the flashing blue light? It was Anatoly Barkov, a vice president of Russia’s LUKoil. Barkov was reportedly treated for minor injuries from the February 25 accident; his driver was not injured. According to Interfax, Barkov told journalists as he was leaving the hospital that he “is no less interested than others in seeing that the circumstances of the tragedy we were involved in are investigated objectively and without bias.”

And who is Anatoly Barkov?

To be honest, there isn’t a lot of information at this point, although hopefully more will emerge in coming days. According to his official biography on the LUKoil site, he was born in 1948. But apparently he wasn’t much of an achiever because he didn’t manage to graduate from the Ufa Oil Institute until 1992. In fact, according to his official biography, he didn’t manage to do anything in the first 44 years of his life. Or maybe he was doing something he can’t really talk about. Too bad Russia never did any serious lustration of just who was working in the KGB, because if it had, people wouldn’t have reasonable grounds to suspect that that’s exactly where Barkov was working. Some people might also suspect that he was sent into the oil industry for some unknown reason.

He is listed on LUKoil’s site as serving as “vice president in charge of general questions and corporate security and communications” since 1993, a pretty darned good gig for a guy whose college diploma hadn't dried yet.

LUKoil’s website proudly proclaims that it is “the second-largest private oil and gas company in the world in terms of proven reserves.” The site also describes the firm as “one of the largest international, vertically integrated oil and gas companies.” For some reason, the "vertically integrated" part caught my eye.

Other senior executives of this “private” company also apparently had wild, reckless youths that they prefer not to mention.  First Vice President for Business and Finance Sergei Kukura apparently could not get a job until 1992, when he was 39. The head of the company’s legal department, Ivan Maslyayev, graduated from Moscow State University’s law school in 1980 and found employment in 1992. And so on.

Interestingly, the Russian version of “Forbes” last week published excerpts from the memoirs of Lennart Dahlgren, who was the first general director of IKEA in Russia. He gives a lot of interesting insight into what it was like doing business under Putin, including this bit:

One of the leftovers from the old Soviet system that has lasted to the present day is the various types of spies working for the FSB and infiltrating all major businesses. This is part of everyday life, completely ordinary and in most cases completely harmless. During my years in Russia, IKEA security service informed me more than once about such people.

All this reminded me of a recent outraged op-ed in “The New York Times” by “Russian entrepreneur and investor” Vladimir Antonov. He wrote with great pathos that “it is obvious that European business has a strong prejudices [sic] against investors from Russia. There is a fear of Russia itself, of the increase of the influence of Russian businesses in the international market place.”

After trying to argue that “the interests of Europe and the United States obviously do not coincide when it comes to crisis investments,” Antonov concludes that “maybe it would be fairer to trust Russian business. Maybe national prejudices can be abandoned for good. Otherwise, European countries and brands will become victims of their own narrow-mindedness as Russian capital finds new, more progressive markets.”

Antonov is a strange spokesman for the bright new face of Russian business, as this “Financial Times” article makes clear, saying “the main concern [about him] was alleged ties between Mr. Antonov and organized crime.” Antonov dismisses the reports as “false horror stories,” but if you’d like to read a bunch of them (in Russian), you can find them here.

Getting back to the main point, would anyone who knew Anatoly Barkov in, say, 1988, please drop me a line?

-- Robert Coalson

"But in the West they decided that the Russian Federation is talking about a sphere of influence, understanding "privilege" as somehow meaning that our interests are more important than the interests of our neighbor countries," said the third.

"This is probably a matter for linguists, and not for political speculators," Rogozin concluded.

Medvedev first made the "privileged interests" statement in August 2008, shortly after the Russia-Georgia war. He used it again in a Euronews interview the next month, and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and others have picked up on it since then. There is a good, detailed essay on the phrase here that not only quotes its main occurrences in recent times, but delves into pre-revolutionary and Soviet history for analogous foreign-policy terms.

Not only is the term "privileged interests" unclear in the ways that Rogozin discusses, it is also unclear geographically, as the globalsecurity.org analysis notes:

The term "privileged interests" is a novel term in the Russian political discourse, with only a few dozen attestations on Russian websites as of early September 2008. The precise meaning of this terms is unclear. The countries and regions in which these "privileged interests" are to be found remains uncertain. Presumably it applies to the near abroad, the states of the Former Soviet Union, those territories that came under the control of Moscow following the collapse of the Russian Empire. Possibly it extends to the members of the Warsaw Treaty Organization [WTO] - those territories that came under the control of Moscow following victory in the Great Patriotic War.

Possibly it extends to those territories which came under the control of Moscow in the time of the Czars. Such a claim, consistent with the revival of the trappings of the Russian Empire, would be a less expansive claim than the Warsaw Pact countries, but more expansive than the Former Soviet Union. This might include Finland, and Poland.

That question aside, you could make the case that Rogozin has a point. At least in official discourse, the use of "privileged interests" does seem to follow his definition. In his first use of the phrase, Medvedev said: "Finally, fifth, as is the case of other countries, there are regions in which Russia has privileged interests. These regions are home to countries with which we share special historical relations and are bound together as friends and good neighbours. We will pay particular attention to our work in these regions and build friendly ties with these countries, our close neighbours."

About a month later he told the Valdai Discussion Club that:

Russia is a state with a thousand years of history. It is perfectly obvious that we are interested in a stable situation with our neighbours, absolutely all of them, without exception, even those with whom we now have rather difficult relations. And these states have every reason to want things in Russia to be as calm and predictable as possible. What does this mean? It means one simple but very important thing: our neighbours are without any doubt states that are traditionally close to us and they represent the traditional sphere of interests of the Russian Federation. And the Russian Federation is for them exactly the same sort of traditional sphere of interest.

However, he immediately followed this egalitarian formulation with something more ominous that I doubt many of Russia's neighbors would agree with: "We are so close to each other that it is impossible to come between us: it is impossible to say that Russia would like things a certain way, and our neighbours another."

On the other hand, Medvedev's official site (as well as the Russian Foreign Ministry's) translates the Russian "privilegirovannyye interesy" as "privileged interests," not as "especially important interests" or even as "vital interests" or anything else. That is, the Russian government has adopted the word "privileged" and, presumably, its meanings. In English, the word means "having or enjoying one or more privileges" and "not subject to the usual rules or penalties because of some special circumstance."

Maybe it really is a mistake to translate "privilegirovannyye" as "privileged." After all, most students of Russian have, at one time or another, had their knuckles rapped for translating "akkuratny" as "accurate" instead of the correct "careful, tidy, thorough." So, if Rogozin really thinks his definition of "privilegirovannyye" is correct, he should see that the official translations are corrected before he goes after "people in the West." (My Oxford Russian-English dictionary, though, says the Kremlin translators are correct....)

Since Rogozin advised us to seek the counsel of linguists, I asked my old Russian teacher, Cornell University's Slava Paperno, undoubtedly one of the first people to rap my knuckles for mistranslating "akkuratny." Slava is the author or co-author of numerous dictionaries, articles, textbooks, and language-study computer programs, as well as an acclaimed translator of books from English into Russian.

When I showed Rogozin's tweets to Slava, he attributed the "misunderstanding" to Russia's reckless borrowing of (particularly) English terms during what Rogozin would no doubt describe as "the terrible ‘90s." "The Russians brought this upon themselves," Slava wrote to me in an e-mail. "When they start using borrowed words in new, frivolous (i.e. non-Russian) meanings, how can they expect to be understood? They are losing control of their language, not to mention their thought."

When I read this, I suddenly had a very clear flashback to one evening during "the terrible ‘90s" when I was listening to some official (Gaidar? Chubais? Who knows?) and heard him say it was necessary to "prolongirovat kredit" (to extend the loan). That is, he used some weird version of the English word "to prolong" instead of the perfectly good Russian word "prodlit." In that case, the Russian speakers had to figure out what he meant, while, apparently, in the case of the privileged interests, the English speakers are the ones being misled.

Words do matter and translators have a tough row to hoe (translate that!). And if the world is as confused about what President Medvedev means by "privileged interests" as Rogozin seems to think, it would stand to reason that the Kremlin would do more to clear up the issue than have their NATO ambassador issue a few tweets.

-- Robert Coalson

President Dmitry Medvedev picked up a bunch of positive press on February 18 when, apparently in response to the massive numbers of police-abuse scandals that have emerged in recent months, he appeared at an Interior Ministry conference and laid down the law. Even fellow Power Verticalist Brian Whitmore and myself were mildly impressed that Medvedev had summoned the power to dismiss two deputy interior ministers and some 13 other police generals. It is the common wisdom that the Interior Ministry is one of those areas of government that Vladimir Putin keeps strictly under his thumb, so it seemed a little odd to see Medvedev making a strike so close to Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev, a Putin protectorate.
 

Of course, the fact that Medvedev tapped Nurgaliyev to implement his as-yet-undetailed Interior Ministry reform is a pretty good clue that the changes are likely to be cosmetic. “Ogonyok” did a nice series of pieces on the ministry’s troubles and noted that "the majority of experts agree that for now the guiding tool in the matter of reforming police structures is not a systematic approach, but a 'personal' one." That is, in good Soviet tradition, a reform initiative will just be used to settle political scores and/or provide the background music for a game of Kremlin musical chairs.
 

“Ogonyok” also noted some interesting facts about the two deputy interior ministers that Medvedev bravely dismissed. One was Arkady Yedelev, who was in charge of the Southern Federal District and, particularly, the counterterrorism operation in Chechnya. He had essentially been sitting around with nothing to do since the government declared the successful conclusion of that mission last spring and his dismissal now probably has more to do with Medvedev’s recent reorganization of the Southern Federal District than with any meaningful police reform. When the music stops, we can be pretty sure that Yedelev won’t be standing.
 

The other deputy minister to get the ax was Nikolai Ovchinnikov, who had been serving on a contract basis for more than a year since he passed the mandatory retirement age. (More on Ovchinnikov below.)
 

Of the 13 other generals that Medvedev “fired” on February 18, one was Viktor Syusyur, former head of the Interior Ministry’s Bashkortostan office, who has been in custody since last October on dozens of corruption charges. Another was the former head of the municipal police in Tomsk, Viktor Grechman, who was actually fired in January after one of his officers beat a local journalist to death at a police facility.
 

With a police force like Russia’s, one would think that it would be pretty easy for Medvedev to take aim and hit some pretty slimy characters. In fact, one would think that it would be pretty hard to do otherwise. But he seems to have managed it.
 

Ovchinnikov, despite his advancing years, seems not to have been one of the bad apples at all (which, come to think of it, may be the reason he was fired). Yesterday a group of leading Russian human rights activists sent Medvedev an open letter urging him to reinstate Ovchinnikov, whom they credit with doing much to help improve relations between the police and civic groups. At the top of the list of signatories was the 82-year-old head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Lyudmila Alekseyeva, who was roughed up by Moscow police at a peaceful demonstration on December 31. Their letter is worth reproducing here in full:

On February 19, 2010, Deputy Interior Minister and police Colonel-General Nikolai Aleksandrovich Ovchinnikov was dismissed. Ovchinnikov had dedicated more than 40 years to service in police agencies.

The beginning of a fruitful dialogue between human rights organs and the Russian Interior Ministry, an increase in the openness of the Russian Interior Ministry in relations with civil-society organizations, and the struggle to clean up the ranks of the police are all connected with the name of Nikolai Ovchinnikov.

In his role as Interior Ministry state secretary, Ovchinnikov actively worked for the passage of the law on public control over corrections facilities. As a representative of the Interior Ministry, he unfailingly supported other legislative initiatives aimed at fostering the development of civil society.

As a deputy minister, Ovchinnikov was unusually open to the mass media, representatives of civic organizations, and the public.

His ability to win the sympathies of the most difficult audiences was rare for a leader of his status. His programs on television improved the attitude toward the police of hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens and helped television viewers maintain their faith in decency and to become a little wiser.

When professionals of this caliber among police generals are fewer than the number demanded by police reforms, Ovchinnikov’s dismissal seems strange and surprising.

But it is even more surprising that in a European country where the retirement age is being pushed back almost every year that a man of just 61 is considered too old to fulfill important government duties.

We call on the president of the Russian Federation to find a way to further exploit the talents and human qualities of Nikolai Ovchinnikov for the good of our country and Russian society.

Lyudmila Alekseyeva (Moscow Helsinki Group); Andrei Babushkin (Committee for Civil Rights); Valerei Borshchev (Social Partnership Fund and chairman of the Moscow Public Oversight Commission); Valentin Gefter (Human Rights Institute); Sergei Grinin (Civic Safety); Lyubov Kravtsova (Moscow Oblast Public Oversight Commission); Sergei Nikitin (Russian chapter of Amnesty International); Vladimir Khimanych (Free Will); and Tamara Flerova (Moscow Public Oversight Commission)

Clearly, Medvedev has picked a strange way to launch his loudly proclaimed police reform.

-- Robert Coalson

There has been a lot of ink spilled in recent years about the supposed fecklessness of the Russian opposition and their purported inability to come up with “new ideas” instead of just complaining (the critics usually use the word “whining”) about Kremlin policies (Kremlin critics usually use the word “abuses”). While there maybe grains of truth in these arguments (personally, I rarely see them), you have to keep in mind the political environment that has emerged in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

A pair of brave political consultants in Saratov has written a book describing how the local United Russia party machine uses a noxious slurry of dirty tricks, illegal activities, and domination of the media to discredit and destroy any politician, businessperson, or anyone else deemed an enemy of the Saratov Oblast United Russia party boss and Duma deputy speaker Vyacheslav Volodin (who just celebrated his 45th birthday on February 4!) .

The book, “The Black PR Practitioners Of The White Bear,” will be published in Moscow soon. As coauthor Sergei Pochechuyev told RFE/RL’s Russian Service, “This is yet another warning about how we cannot have any illusions that power and politics can be moral unless we change the system entirely. Because the politics we show are amoral politics, the politics of moral cripples.”

Pochechuyev and fellow author Igor Osovin are former Saratov political consultants who were directly involved in the dirty politics that they describe in the book and who are now asking forgiveness of those whom they harmed.

Pochechuyev’s description of the way things are done in Russia deserves quoting at length:
 

At first when a person is identified as a personal enemy of Volodin they initiate a series of negative articles in the mass media. Next those representatives of the public who only imitate the feverish activity of building civil society are activated. These pseudo-activists create paid-for articles in the media that create the necessary public outcry. Or their activities become the excuse for new paid-for articles and television reports. When the number of publications reaches a critical mass, local deputies begin flooding the state organs of the Russian Federation with official inquiries and letters from residents of Saratov Oblast demanding decisive action be taken against the target of Volodin’s attacks, although they produce no real facts that the person has violated the law, because there are no such facts. They merely cite the numerous publications in the media. As a result, authorities higher up in the government form a false image of the real situation in Saratov Oblast. People who are undesirable to Volodin and his entourage and clan are seen in a negative light, which has negative consequences for the political climate inside the region and for the level of decision making here. In short, using such political tactics is a form of disinformation targeting the highest levels of government, which should be considered a premeditated, conspiratorial crime.

The authors of the new book say that in Saratov it costs about 40,000-50,000 ($1,300-$1,700) rubles to place an article in the press and about 75,000 to arrange a roundtable on a particular topic. They say that they personally handled nearly 2 million rubles just in the second half of 2007. As might be expected, the money was all in cash and under the table, not reflected in the party’s financial documents.

The authors described one piquant scene from November 2007 when United Russia disrupted a press conference in support of a local opposition politician by paying a student 18,000 rubles to come into the hall and throw a bucket of animal feces at the journalists. The next day, the local media were flooded with paid stories about the event that asserted it was an opposition trick to “discredit” United Russia. (This “discrediting” tactic is a common one among the Putin crowd – the most offensive example of it being the still-sometimes-heard assertion that investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was killed by people who wanted to “discredit” Putin; for a good example of this arguing, check out this article.)

This is the context against which claims of “popularity” and “unpopularity” must be measured in Russia. And as the authors correctly note, the distortions of the information environment in Russia also affect the perceptions of the country’s leadership itself. It is hard to imagine how anyone could carry out meaningful reform in Russia without addressing these problems first of all.

-- Robert Coalson
 

It is now widely known that the much-touted agreement from the July summit about the transit of lethal cargo to Afghanistan via Russian airspace has produced no real results. There have been only an uncertain number of flights in seven months and both sides blame the other – although Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told RFE/RL that the problems stem from Kazakhstan. The U.S. State Department reported that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Lavrov discussed the matter during a 45-minute conversation on the sidelines of the London conference on Yemen on January 27, a sure sign that things aren't moving smoothly.

Dmitry Rogozin, Russia’s ambassador to NATO, told journalists today that “there is no political problem in this; there is Russia’s natural demand of guaranteeing air transport security.” Not sure what that means. He also admitted that the ground transit of nonlethal equipment to Afghanistan has not been working “at full capacity,” blaming NATO for failing to resolve issues with other transit countries. “As to transit,” Rogozin said, “the problem is not with us.”

My own efforts over the last two weeks to get informed comment on this matter from Rogozin, from the U.S. Defense Department, and from the defense attaché of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow have not been successful so far. I keep trying. I can only assume that their unwillingness to talk to me means they don’t have anything to brag about.

What about other aspects of U.S.-Russian cooperation? At the July summit, it was agreed to create the Obama-Medvedev Commission, which would have working groups in many areas from culture and mass media, to international security, to economic relations, to nuclear issues, and so on. That commission’s end-of-the-year report makes pretty lame reading. Most of the working groups only met once during the first half year (the working group on Civil Society held its first meeting in Washington this week and you can read RFE/RL’s interview with working group Co-chairman Michael McFaul here).

The working group on military cooperation didn’t meet itself, but coopted the results of the U.S.-Russia Joint General Staff group, which did, and reported “noteworthy progress was made at the talks which focused on identifying new areas for military cooperation.” Good work.

The environment group has “begun exchanging ideas on priority areas of focus.” The counternarcotics group “agreed to initiate an exchange of information” and apparently discussed the drugs problem stemming from Afghanistan – although clearly Russia at least is not satisfied with that situation.

Presidents Obama and Medvedev also agreed to carry out a joint threat assessment, but as far as I can tell, there has been no progress on this question. I haven’t even heard of a meeting or talks, and it seems clear from various public statements that Washington and Moscow are miles apart on assessing the threat from Iran.

One of the areas that is often mentioned as potentially fruitful for cooperation is missile defense. To take just the latest example, Clinton floated the idea in her speech on European security in Paris today. Ever since the Bush administration proposed its missile-defense plans for central Europe, there has been talk of joint missile defense.

And it would seem a start was made on this. In July, Presidents Medvedev and Obama agreed to cooperate on monitoring missile launches. Of course, cooperation on missile defense is much more complicated than cooperation on joint missile-launch monitoring and that is much more complicated than, say, overflight rights for military cargo bound for Afghanistan.

And the track record on U.S.-Russian cooperation on missile-launch monitoring is pathetic, to say the least.

I spoke the other day with Victoria Samson, a long-time missile-defense expert and author of the 2007 paper “Prospects For Russian-American Missile Defense Cooperation: Lessons From RAMOS and JDEC.” She told me that the Obama-Medvedev declaration in July on cooperation in monitoring missile launches sounds exactly like a June 2000 declaration between Presidents Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin on the creation of the Joint Data Exchange Center (JDEC), which was to provide “an uninterrupted exchange of information on launches of ballistic missiles and space launch vehicles.” As Samson’s paper explains in detail, the two sides bickered for a decade on how to implement the project and who would pay the taxes for it.

“They finally got to the point where they had an old Russian schoolhouse outside of Moscow that they had rented and that they were saying was going to be the site of that,” she told me. “But eventually, I think, they realized that it wasn’t going to happen. They stopped paying for it and are letting it go to fallow.”

RAMOS, by the way, stands for the Russian-American Observation Satellite system, which was agreed to in 1997 “to simultaneously create two satellites to share warning of missile attacks.” That project went nowhere and in 2004 was quietly killed by the Pentagon, which issued a statement saying, “We are extremely interested in cooperative efforts with the Russian Federation but we have been concerned about the…RAMOS program.”

Samson tells me that JDEC has not been officially killed yet and she suspects that the Obama-Medvedev declaration in July, rather than being a new initiative as it was sold publicly, was a pledge to revive this dormant effort. She says, however, that there has been no activity on JDEC since July, adding that the Obama administration will submit its budget request to Congress next week and we might be able to tell then whether any funding has been earmarked for this project. Vice President Joe Biden, writing in the “Wall Street Journal” today, wrote at length about plans to increase spending on the U.S. nuclear arsenal and infrastructure, but did not mention JDEC or the pledge to cooperate on missile-launch detection.

Samson says the political, military, and technical problems of actual missile-defense cooperation are “orders of magnitude” greater than those associated with mere missile-launch monitoring. Samson says that U.S. efforts to cooperate on missile defense with Germany and Italy have moved very slowly and with great difficulty, so the idea of a similar or even more ambitious project with Russia seems, to say the least, unrealistic.

“It is very frustrating because you would think that something that helps increase security and transparency and confidence [like joint missile-launch monitoring] is sort of a low-risk collaborative measure,” Samson concludes. “It seems it would be a perfect sort of project that the United States and Russia could cooperate on. And so, when we can’t get our acts together on something like that, the whole concept of the United States and Russia cooperating on something as politically difficult as ballistic missile defense, I think, is highly unlikely.”

-- Robert Coalson

The website of “The London Times” today has a story that is full of wonderful ironies. I can’t help but imagine Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin giggling with delight. It seems too fantastic to suggest that he could have planned this, but he definitely kept his eyes open for opportunities and they all fell into place marvelously.

The “Times” story today, which is based on an exclusive interview with oligarch Aleksandr Lebedev, reveals that a Russian state bank that is directly controlled by Putin (he is chairman of the supervisory board, which is made up entirely of his cabinet ministers) will purchase large stakes in the Aeroflot airline and the Ilyushin Finance Corporation from Lebedev. The value of the deal, which will be finalized on February 17, was not disclosed, but the money should come in handy as Lebedev maneuvers to purchase the U.K.’s “Independent” newspaper (even the name of the newspaper is one of those ironies that is too rich for fiction).

But we get ahead of ourselves. The story really begins back in the 1990s, when one-time oligarch Boris Berezovsky was riding high in Moscow and laying waste to all the ideals that had blossomed during perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Berezovsky was an unscrupulous manipulator who turned political connection into wealth and then wealth into further political connection and more wealth. He was the brains, if you can use that expression, behind the 1996 presidential-election fraud and the gray cardinal behind Putin’s own rise to power.

But he soon broke with Putin, who couldn’t tolerate Berezovsky’s combination of political ruthlessness and economic might, and was forced to give up most of his assets and flee the country. Berezovsky fled to London in 2001, where he managed to get himself political asylum despite repeated Kremlin protests and efforts to have him extradited.

From exile, he has continued to lob broadsides at the Kremlin ever since, which I am sure has done little to warm Putin’s heart toward London. (Somewhere in this story it must also be mentioned that Berezovsky was a friend and promoter of former FSB officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, the harsh Putin critic who died after being poisoned in London by exotic polonium-210. Putin reserves a special hatred for security agents who come out against him.)

One of the assets Berezovsky left behind was, ironically, the airline Aeroflot. That company was at the heart of the first set of criminal charges against him. A Russian court in 2007 convicted him in absentia of embezzling $9 million from the company and sentenced him to six years in prison. Last June, he was sentenced to 13 years on similar charges in connection with his former companies AvtoVAZ and LogoVAZ.

And just so that he knows Putin hasn’t forgotten him, prosecutors filed a new set of embezzlement charges against Berezovsky last September in connection with the SBS-Agro bank.

Enter Lebedev, a former KGB intelligence officer who spied out of the Soviet Embassy in London during the 1980s and who, like Putin, is unapologetic for his role in the Soviet system. As the Times Online article puts it so nicely, “He went into business after the collapse of Communism, becoming rich on complex banking deals.”

Last year, Lebedev bought the U.K.’s “Evening Standard.” He also owns the feisty Russian paper “Novaya gazeta,” and he has tried to form a socialist-leaning party together with former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, an idea that was reportedly quashed by Kremlin domestics-politics overlord Vladislav Surkov.

Lebedev admits that he is loyal to Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev, describing himself as “a modernization force.” “He cites [jailed former Yukos owner Mikhail] Khodorkovsky’s description of him as ‘one of us’ to counter allegations that he is a tame Kremlin Trojan horse sent to buy Western media,” the Times Online article says. “He also attributes gossip that he is a ‘Putin stooge’ to Boris Berezovsky.” While it is true that Lebedev has certain liberal credentials – the record of “Novaya gazeta” is extraordinary and courageous – he is hardly, as the Times Online article claims, “one of [the Kremlin’s] most outspoken critics.”

In fact, in a second Times Online article based on the same interview, Lebedev says: “The only good reforms which happened in this country always came from the top. Maybe we can offer [Putin and Medvedev] a helping hand if they want to…. I think most of the corruption in this country has nothing to do with Putin and Medvedev.”

Another delight in this whole story is that for a brief while back last April, it appeared that Lebedev might be a candidate for mayor of Sochi and that one of his rivals would be Andrei Lugovoi – a former FSB officer who is suspected by British authorities of being the person who gave Litvinenko the fatal polonium-laced tea. In the end, Lebedev was not allowed to run and Lugovoi withdrew, ostensibly to focus on his duties as a deputy in the Duma.

Lebedev claims that the infusion from Putin’s bank will not be used to finance his bid for “The Independent. Lebedev lays out a too-good-to-be-true list of feel-good projects that he intends to pursue with the money. “He plans to invest the funds…into building 20,000 affordable homes, developing agricultural projects and creating a British-style building society to offer low-cost mortgages.” As if that weren’t enough, he also cites his working opening a children’s leukemia hospital in Russia and his fundraising for the Raisa Gorbachev Foundation.

Maybe Lebedev is his own man, maybe he isn’t. But, as “The Guardian” documented recently, the Kremlin is spending $1.4 billion this year on “international propaganda” and it has tripled spending on state news agencies and works with numerous Western PR firms to boost its image in the West.

But if Lebedev is a “Trojan horse,” then how fun it must be for Putin to see the money for subverting the British press coming from the renationalization of one of the flagship companies of his old nemesis Berezovsky.

--  Robert Coalson

I was talking to some colleagues yesterday about RFE/RL’s recent interview with Kremlin-connected political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky. There are a lot of great tidbits in this interview and we’ve been talking about it a lot lately.

One of the things that caught my eye was when our correspondent asked him about the criticism of opposition groups to the inclusion of first deputy presidential administration head Vladislav Surkov in a joint U.S.-Russian working group on civil society (that commission is holding its first meeting in Washington today and RT has an interview with him about its agenda and plans). Pavlovsky acted as if he hadn’t understood the question, saying that all the “opposition” groups supported Surkov. Apparently, nowadays, the word “opposition” only applies to the controlled, faux-opposition parties represented in the Duma (that is, allowed by the Kremlin to participate in elections and win seats – the Communists, A Just Russia, and the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia).

Using masterful circular reasoning, Pavlovsky said all the groups and figures that have been systematically, intentionally, and undemocratically marginalized by the authorities (using their control over the media, legislatures, election commissions, the courts, and so on) are now “too marginal” to be considered in any way significant. Pavlovsky’s comments are a good illustration of what seems to be a concerted effort to co-opt the word “opposition” in Russia to denote a handful of parties that as often as not votes with the Kremlin’s United Russia party and that have clearly tacitly or explicitly agreed to keep their “opposition” tendency within clear boundaries.

But I digress. The part of the Pavlovsky interview that we were discussing yesterday was his comments about Surkov’s supposed power and influence. Our correspondent described Surkov in his question as “the architect of the deconstruction of an open society in Russia.” And Pavlovsky was quick to correct him:

The architect of the system in Russia is Putin, not Surkov – that has to be understood clearly. Surkov is a high-level bureaucrat…. People who work in the administration are simply implementers, implementers of directives that they receive from above.

We were discussing the extent to which this could possibly be true, given the size and complexity of a country like Russia. If people as close to the ultimate leadership in Russia as Surkov are to be dismissed as mere “implementers,” then we must be talking of essentially a monarchy – and a very primitive monarchy at that, we joked. (Pavlovsky, evidently, hasn't changed much from the guy whose Effective Politics Foundation was handing out T-shirts in late 1999 with the slogan "Putin Is Our Everything.")

So the word monarchy was still rattling around in my head this morning when I read a story about a court case in Oryol. In that case, National Bolshevik activist Mikhail Deyev faces charges of participating in an extremist organization and “arousing hatred and enmity, or dishonoring a person or group of people on the basis of nationality or social standing.” Prosecutors are seeking a four-year prison term for Deyev.

A local state body called the Kursk Laboratory of Judicial Expertise was asked to make a ruling on a flyer that Deyev was caught distributing, and its finding is posted here (click on the images to enlarge). That flyer bore the slogans “Down with autocracy and hereditary monarchy!” and “Join the ranks of the free people of Russia!” The Kursk experts determined that the reference to “autocracy” and “hereditary monarchy” must refer to the current authorities of Russia and so the flyer represented a call for the violent overthrow of the government. The experts decided it was a “violent” call because the slogans were accompanied by a picture of “masked people with rolled up sleeves, sticks in their hands, exclusively males.”

The experts also took exception to the National Bolsheviks’ implication that only people fighting against autocracy are “free people.” “The general sense of this flyer,” the experts wrote, “is a call to unite and join the ranks of the ‘natsbolov,’ who are characterized exclusively as ‘free people of Russia’ (the rest aren’t free!!!).” The outraged exclamation marks are delightful.

Anyway, Deyev is now reasonably speculating whether the experts’ equation of the reference to “hereditary monarchy” to the current government of Russia isn’t somehow revealing. Fellow activist Georgy Sarkisyan wrote on LiveJournal: "I understand it this way: autocracy -- that's Vova [Putin], hereditary monarchy -- Dima [Medvedev]. Jeez. I suddenly feel like singing 'God Save The Tsar'."

Maybe we were too quick to downplay Pavlovsky’s remarks. At any rate, it is a thorny freedom-of-speech issue that RT might want to look into after it finishes venting its outrage that some of its ads were recently refused at U.S. and British airports.

-- Robert Coalson

The Kremlin has been describing the January 22 State Council meeting as “historic,” so we here at The Power Vertical thought it deserves at least two posts. Yesterday Brian Whitmore noted the strident tone that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin took at the meeting and that, overall, it was perfectly clear that limits were being laid down, probably in an attempt to quash overly ambitious expectations evoked by the “liberal” President Dmitry Medvedev.

Although it was a surprise that Putin spoke at the meeting, the tone and content of his speech were not surprising. What was surprising was Medvedev’s speech, which made no apologies for Russia’s current political system and offered no acknowledgment that the country’s flawed and manipulated electoral system is incapable of bestowing real legitimacy on the government. I have said before that this is a big conceptual problem for Medvedev, whose “liberal” leanings (if he actually has any) are hemmed in by the fact that it is virtually impossible for him to admit the basic truth that he himself was installed, not elected president.

The message of the State Council meeting was that whatever “modernization” goes on under Medvedev, whatever is done to combat corruption or to reform the police or the courts – it will be achieved strictly within the framework of a political system that produces and fosters secrecy and unaccountability.

In an article about the State Council session published before it took place, but perfectly anticipating its content, “Rossiiskaya gazeta” – the official organ of Putin’s government – quoted analyst Aleksei Chesnakov as saying, “in any event the authorities are going to act proceeding from the logic that the political system must change but not be changed.” Vyacheslav Nikonov said in the same January 15 article, “there will be no reform of the political system as such.”

After the meeting, analyst Vladimir Pribylovsky told RFE/RL’s Russian Service that any changes that come out of the session will amount to nothing more than “painting the facade.”

The tenor of the State Council session was an exact echo of the political-system section of Medvedev’s November Address to the Federal Assembly. In a post-mortem on that speech published on gazeta.ru on November 19, independent elections analyst Arkady Lyubarev wrote about Medvedev’s proposals: “Whether they will serve the purpose of strengthening democracy on the regional level or, on the contrary, will bolster authoritarian tendencies depends on how they are realized.”

Isn't that always the bottom-line problem with any attempt to address systemic problems with nonsystemic solutions?

Ultimately, the decision not to introduce any accountability or public buy-in to the political system could have a direct impact on the 2012 election and Russia’s future direction beyond that date. In a fascinating interview with RFE/RL, Kremlin political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky notes that some time about a year from now, Putin and Medvedev are going to have to decide which of them will be enthroned as president in 2012. Of course, any crisis could happen, in which case the natural impulse will be to return the strongman Putin to the Kremlin. But, barring that, Pavlovsky argues that if Medvedev is able to show some concrete results of his modernization program by the time that discussion takes place (I suppose that discussion is the closest thing Russia is going to have to a “free and fair” election any time in the foreseeable future) and if his standing with the bureaucracy and elites strengthens further, he could well emerge as the chosen one. Pavlovsky, without irony, describes this best-case scenario as the “successful-inertial scenario.”

A second term for Medvedev, arguably, could produce another wave of expectations of “liberalization” and give him a modicum of political capital to move in that direction. If modernization produces no results (and a year isn’t very long to get moving on something so grandiose, even under the best of circumstances), Pavlovsky implies that the elites will scurry back to Putin. Given Russia’s current situation and trajectory, it seems reasonable to wonder whether there isn’t an inherent conflict between the “successful” and the “inertial” parts of Pavlovsky’s formulation. At the very least, it is hard to get one’s mind around the idea of an “inertial” reform plan.

The Kremlin’s views on Russia’s political system grow more “liberal” when elections are far on the horizon and decidedly more “pragmatic” every time an election nears. That means the sober and uninspiring State Council meeting last Friday is practically the high-water mark of political liberalization that we are likely to see before the next election cycle.

-- Robert Coalson

Russia Today (RT), the Kremlin's English-language television news channel, is reporting that a series of provocative advertisements for the channel was rejected by major airports in the United States. One of the ads features images of Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and U.S. President Barack Obama superimposed over one another next to the question "Who poses the greater nuclear threat?"

The ads promote the station's new "Question more" slogan. Another ad in the series juxtaposes a microphone and an automatic rifle with the question, "Which is the more powerful weapon?" A third asks whether climate change is "science fact or science fiction," while a fourth contrasts images of a soldier and a terrorist while asking "is terror only inflicted by terrorists?"

The RT ads, including one that compares a British police officer with a tattooed soccer hooligan, are being displayed on street ads in the United Kingdom. A spokesman for BAA, the company that manages the major U.K. airports in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and elsewhere told RFE/RL the ads had been declined at their facilities as well, although RT's story decries only the U.S. airport ban.

As is often the case with controversial ad campaigns, this one is getting a lot of mileage in the so-called alternative press. RT's version of the matter has been reproduced verbatim on websites as diverse as Irish Nationalism, Silobreaker, and something called the Global Europe Anticipation Bulletin.

Over at "The Guardian," Luke Harding puts the RT initiative into context, noting that "next year the Russian government will spend $1.4 billion (866 million pounds) on international propaganda – more than on fighting unemployment."

Harding writes:

The Kremlin employs two major PR agencies, Ketchum and GPlus, and in London uses Portland PR. And then there are the angry bloggers – a shadowy army of Russian nationalists who are active on western newspaper websites, including the Guardian's Comment is free site. Anyone who dares to criticise Russia's leaders, or point out some of the country's deficiencies, is immediately branded a CIA spy or worse. "They [the Kremlin] are coming to realise that information matters and that control of information internationally matters even more," says Evgeny Morozov, a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown University's institute for the study of diplomacy.

This is definitely something to keep an eye on. One can't help but wonder if there is a connection between these efforts and a startling op-ed that appeared in yesterday's "The Sydney Morning Herald," in which former Australian parliamentarian Ross Cameron celebrates the 10th anniversary of Vladimir Putin's power in Russia by lauding Putin as a free-market liberal who has been "entrenching the rule of law" in Russia and is the most popular politician "in the democratic world."

Cameron ends by saying, "it is hard for me to see how anyone of good faith could regret his continued influence in Russia and the world." Needless to say, the "shadow army of Russian nationalists who are active on Western newspaper websites" have been lining up to second Cameron's opinions. "Wow! I had no idea," one reader writes. "I just went along with the standard media line that Putin was Stalin-lite. I now agree -- Putin isn't perfect but maybe he is perfect for Russia today." Maybe the reader meant to write "perfect for Russia Today."

Harding ends his piece with a quotation from Margarita Simonyan, "RT's 29-year-old editor in chief," responding to whether RT can find an audience in the West. "People will be surprised at how much there is in the world that they haven't been told before," Simonyan said. If only viewers of Russian domestic television had any idea of how much there is in Russia that they haven't been told before.

-- Robert Coalson

Not too long ago, The Power Vertical joined Russian human rights advocates in urging Moscow to ratify the 14th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights. Russia is the only Council of Europe member that has not yet signed on to the protocol, which is aimed at “preventing violations at the national level and improving domestic remedies” for alleged rights violations. Ratifying and enforcing the protocol is considered by many a key step in establishing an independent and responsible judiciary in Russia.

So we were delighted to hear that President Dmitry Medvedev late last month instructed the Duma to consider the measure (which hasn’t been discussed in the lower house for three years) in the first week of its next session. That session opens on January 15, and Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov has been all over the Russian press declaring that the Duma will jump right on the 14th Protocol question.

Good news? Don’t hold your breath. RFE/RL Russian Service correspondent Danila Galperovich put this news into context for me today. It turns out that the European Court of Human Rights is expected to rule on an appeal filed by the oil company Yukos that goes to the heart of the tax charges filed against the company for the years 2000-03 and the forced sale (to a shadow company that later passed it on to state-controlled Rosneft) of its main production asset, Yuganskneftegaz. The Yukos complaint was filed in April 2004 and has been slowly making its way through the Strasbourg system. In August 2008, for instance, Russian judge Valery Musin was elected a member of Gazprom’s board of directors, meaning that he had to recuse himself from the matter. Over the last year, the case has been hung up while Medvedev’s replacement for Musin, Andrei Bushev, familiarized himself with the case.

Getting back to the 14th Protocol, a cynical person (and sometimes The Power Vertical indulges in cynicism) might think the Kremlin is holding out the carrot of possible ratification of the protocol (or at least the promise the Duma will “consider” ratifying it) as a way of signaling to Strasbourg that a quid pro quo might be arranged.

A cynical person might further think that if the Strasbourg court issues a ruling on January 14 that is not quite what the Kremlin would like to see, Duma deputies will respond in an orchestrated huff by shelving the protocol indefinitely (that is, until the next time the Kremlin feels it gain benefit by trotting it out again).

But is such cynicism justified? Galperovich reminds us that in October the Duma announced it would consider the 14th Protocol in November. Duma Deputy Pavel Krasheninnikov then was telling journalists the Duma could sign off on the document “by the end of the year.”

The timing of that flurry of reports was interesting because on October 1 the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) considered a measure signed by 72 PACE members that would have stripped Russia of its voting rights in the body over its recognition of the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Apparently, Russia was pleased enough that the PACE rejected the punitive measure to make favorable noises about the 14th Protocol, but not pleased enough to actually move forward with it.

It is a game the Kremlin is good at playing. As one analyst described the game to me this week (speaking of an entirely different context), Moscow creates a problem and then offers to solve it for a price.

Are we seeing this kind of game now with the protocol? Watch and see. My guess is that if Strasbourg rules harshly against Moscow and its Kremlin-controlled judicial system, the Duma will loudly and indignantly send the protocol back to committee without discussion. If, on the other hand, the court ruling satisfies Moscow, the Duma will hold a few days of discussion and then quietly let the matter drop until the next time Medvedev needs some leverage in the Council of Europe or some other European body. Or am I being too cynical?

-- Robert Coalson

On January 12, the legislature of the Republic of Altai will convene and rubberstamp President Dmitry Medvedev’s recent nomination of republic head Aleksandr Berdnikov for a second term.

The date is significant because it comes almost exactly one year after the January 9, 2009, crash of a helicopter in the republic carrying several high-ranking officials who had been shamelessly shooting endangered animals with high-powered rifles for “sport.” Among the dead were Medvedev’s envoy to the State Duma and the local head of the Committee on the Preservation and Exploitation of Natural Resources. Regional Deputy Governor Anatoly Bannikh survived the crash, as he survived a similar crash in 2005. The helicopter was owned by – Gazpromavia.

After activists got a hold of photos of the carcasses of the slaughtered endangered animals and posted them online, there was a brief storm of public outrage. The government’s response was to conduct a closed investigation and sweep the whole thing under the rug. Anyone out there remember hearing about convictions (killing protected argali mountain sheep is a crime punishable by up to two years in prison)?

The website rabkor.ru, writing before Medvedev's reappointment of Berdnikov, listed the incidenton its roll call of 2009 events, naming the dead poachers “Bureaucrats of the Year”:
 

Investigators open and close the case into the helicopter crash. In the end, those who died are blamed. The Investigations Committee cannot explain why Altai Republic Deputy Governor Anatoly Bannikh and the three other crash survivors are not guilty of killing the argali sheep. Bannikh, incidentally, indirectly took the blame on himself and quit his post.

(Bannikh’s resignation came in March. The investigation cleared him of poaching charges. This “Izvestia” account of his resignation ends with the telling line: “By all accounts, Anatoly Bannikh is not too worried about his future.” I asked RFE/RL’s Russian Service what Bannikh is up to now, a year after his brush with death and got this response: “Anatoly Bannikh lives in Moscow. According to several sources, he is tied to structures affiliated Gazprom. He continues to control the financial-industrial group Sibma (Barnaul) and his media business (“Komsomolskaya pravda – Altai,” “Argumenty i fakty – Altai,” a radio group, and Internet resources)." Sounds like he landed on his feet – again.)

There are a couple of takeaways in this story. For one things, it puts the lie to the assertion that the Internet has enabled Russian society to influence government decisions. This bold claim was made most clearly in a piece by Yelena Lukyanova, a law professor and member of the Public Chamber (tireless analyst Paul Goble summarized Lukyanova’s surprising assertions here). In the wake of the scandal involving police Major Aleksei Dymovsky, who posted his revelations about police corruption on YouTube and held a couple of scandalous press conferences, Lukyanova argued that the Russian government was now responding to “public pressure,” despite “the miserly number of viable independent media” and “a regime of criminal-legal repression” (harsh words from someone on the Kremlin-nurtured Public Chamber!).

If she were writing now, Lukyanova would have to concede that Dymovsky underwent a vicious campaign of character assassination (including a reprehensible article by Constitutional Court Chairman Valery Zorkin in “Rossiiskaya gazeta” to mark Constitution Day). He was fired from his job. He now faces criminal prosecution. If there are any positive consequences of Dymovsky’s YouTube posts, they are certainly a lot slower to manifest themselves than the negative ones. No wonder so few people are lining up to follow his example.

In this case of the Altai helicopter poaching, everyone knows it “happens all the time” and that the central government, the republican government, and Gazprom are deeply implicated. When I wrote about the poaching on this blog last January, one reader commented: “I would have hope (and still have a little hope) that Putin and the Russian government would want to make an example of these poachers as a way of promoting his anti-corruption campaign. With such excellent documentation of the poaching, it seems like a slam dunk.” Now, a year later, we have the answer, dear reader.

Rabkor.ru ended its summary of the crash by saying: “The story of this hunt greatly damaged the image of the current head of the Republic of Altai Aleksandr Berdnikov, whose term expires in January 2010.”

Apparently, though, it didn’t damage Berdnikov’s image in the eyes of Medvedev.

“Regardless of all the statements by the opposition, the center decided not to listen to anyone,” Nikolai Litovtsev, editor of the regional newspaper “Postscriptum,” told RFE/RL’s Russian Service. “Maybe they thought that doing so would be seen as weakness. This decision once again shows that the power vertical lives its own life and the desires of the people of this or that region are beside the point.”

The thing about Berdnikov is that he is Gazprom’s candidate. “The problem is when a powerful financial-industrial group or some other major monopolist comes to an area and begins – like a bull in a china shop – to set up its own rules,” Litsovtsev said in the interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service. “Gazprom has come here. We are talking about the interests of only Gazprom, which will be promoted by the newly appointed governor and that’s all there is to it.”

-- Robert Coalson

There was an old Soviet joke about how central planners decided to reward factories based on how many nails they produced. So the plants naturally began producing copious quantities of miniscule nails. So planners began measuring output by weight, and the factories promptly started producing small numbers of enormous nails.

A similar problem is currently bedeviling efforts to reform the Russian Interior Ministry, as a recent article in gzt.ru makes vividly clear. The site spoke candidly with a police officer identified only as Sergei, who described in detail how the ministry’s insistence on tallying up “solved” crimes motivates officers to commit the most heinous acts.

Sergei describes how ambitious officers boost their statistics (in order to secure bonuses, promotions, or choice assignments from superiors who can recognize a person who will “do whatever is necessary” when they see him) by setting up unsuspecting people, usually by giving them a few drinks and then convincing them to commit a crime to help their new drinking buddy. The drinking buddy, of course, disappears in the confusion surrounding the arrest and if the scam target mentions him, police shut him up just by threatening to charge him with “organizing a criminal gang.”

Sergei expresses little sympathy for these people. “After all, no one forced him to snatch the purse. He did it himself, with his own hands. They should use their heads,” he says.

He has a little more compassion for innocent people who are completely set up. He describes a scam in which a woman borrows $100 from the target. Then she arranges to meet him in public to pay him back, but as soon as she hands over the money, the target is arrested and the woman claims she purchased drugs from him.

“’Are there a lot of cases like that,’ the gzt.ru correspondent asks. And he just closes his eyes affirmatively.”

Alternatively, Sergei says, police can rack up a lot of brownie points by “paving the way” for a known drug dealer and just arresting his customers one after another.

He also describes how the end-of-the-month reckoning at the police station leads to a lively market in which officers who have exceeded their quotas (the most viciously corrupted) sell or trade their extra “solved” crimes to less-fortunate officers (the ones who wasted the whole month pursuing real criminals or keeping the public safe).

Sergei says the heart of the problem is that the ministry is completely infused with a culture of statistics, particularly statistics that show ever-increasing figures for “solved crimes.” The entire ministry and individual departments, precincts, and officers live in terror of the dreaded “analogous period from last year” (known by insiders by the Russian acronym APPG). It is, Sergei says, “the root of all evil” in the force.

He says that an officer who solved 40 crimes last year is simply obligated to solve at least 41 this year. And he compared it to a journalist who covers five terrorist attacks in one year and is informed by his editor that he must cover at least six this year. He describes how every unit in the ministry must account for itself on a quarterly basis and how when the third-quarter report is submitted in October, the pressure begins to solve all the “open” cases and to bring up the current levels to the needed APPG levels before the end of the year.

Comparing the situation to Soviet times, Sergei says back then police were judged only on the percentage of solved crimes and they regularly achieved rates above 90 percent largely by not registering many crimes that actually occurred (this practice made the country look good and pleased Communist Party officials).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ministry “reformed” this system by instilling deep incentives to “solve” as many crimes as possible (and the nefarious one-two punch of police and prosecutors in Russia made this easier than it otherwise would have been). He points out that all police – even patrol cops – have to live up to the APPG quotas, even for administrative offenses like “fighting.”

Sergei’s conclusions are not uplifting: “Everything is rotten to the core, from the top to the bottom,” he says. “You can’t live in their with rose-colored glasses for more than six months,” he adds. “After that, you either act like everyone else or you leave.”

His final assessment reminds me of another old joke, about the man who complained that the food on the airplane was terrible and there wasn’t enough of it. “Our system is bad,” Sergei says. “But it is strong and resilient.”

(For more on police-reform issues, click here, here, here, and here. RFE/RL correspondent Gregory Feifer has a recent three-part series on corruption in Russia, including police corruption, here, here, and here.)
 

-- Robert Coalson

Remember the much-ballyhooed Russian “national projects”? Evidently, you aren’t supposed to.

Let me remind you then that the national projects were four long-term domestic-policy priorities laid out by then-President Vladimir Putin in 2005. They were supposed to bring dramatic improvements to the areas of housing, medical care, education, and agriculture. And they were under the oversight of then-First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. (The projects are now under Putin’s direct supervision.)

Now, according to a front-page report in today’s “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” it turns out that the Kremlin’s priorities have changed. The four projects have become, in the words of one analyst quoted in the piece, “non-priority priority projects.”

Although the national projects played a prominent role in the 2007 Duma “elections” and last year’s presidential “election,” they are rarely mentioned these days. Medvedev gave them a miss during his latest Address to the Federal Assembly and somehow they didn’t get mentioned in his end-of-the-year television interview. He talks about the “national character,” “national habits,” and “national interests,” but no national projects.

During Putin’s four-hour Q&A marathon on December 3, the topic only came up twice in passing, although Putin did pledge to continue the national project in the sphere of education.

The “news” sections of the national projects website haven’t been updated since May. A meeting of the presidential council on the national projects that was scheduled for December 24 was cancelled.

The analysts and economists that “Nezavisimaya gazeta” spoke with were unanimous in their opinion that the national projects were from the inception nothing more than part of the “PR campaign” that was the last national-election season. “Even at the moment when the national projects started, many analysts expressed the opinion that when the new president took office, they would be discontinued. When the financial crisis hit in 2009, no one doubted this any longer,” FBK strategic analyst Igor Nikolayev told the daily.

Medvedev was virtually unknown when he was named to head the national projects. In March 2007 he conducted a stage-managed Internet conference about them, which was his first real foray onto the national political stage and the beginning of his audition for the role of president. He then used the position to get a lot of good photo ops around the country at ribbon cuttings and the like.

Today’s “Nezavisimaya” story, however, notes that only the housing project actually had concrete numbers behind it – and that this project has failed to achieve its targets. In 2007 Putin said the project would be building 80 million square meters of new housing annually by 2010, but the figure for 2008 was just 64.1 million and for the first 11 months of this year, just 45.5 million.

The most successful of the four projects is the one in agriculture, the analysts say. Thanks largely to state subsidies, agricultural production did not fall markedly during the tough economic times of 2009, Nikolayev said.

It is interesting that today’s story appeared in “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” a paper that is supportive of Medvedev and tries to nudge him in liberal directions.
Perhaps the editors are trying to breathe new life into the dormant initiatives by shining some light on them again. But openly stating that the entire program was nothing more than a cynical, populist dog-and-pony show from the very beginning could be going a step too far.

-- Robert Coalson

If there is anyone out there who thinks that President Dmitry Medvedev is serious about his stated intention of rooting out “legal nihilism” and strengthening the rule of law in Russia, here is one more chance to see how he acts instead of merely listening to how he speaks.

Today the Presidium of the Supreme Court upheld a two-year-old finding by the European Court of Human Rights that the arrest and detention in 2003 of former Yukos financial-arm head Platon Lebedev was illegal.

It is unclear whether the decision will have any impact on Lebedev’s subsequent conviction. Most likely, the courts will find a twisted reasoning to assert that his 2005 conviction on embezzlement and tax-evasion charges stands (I’m reminded of a court decision after Medvedev’s presidential election that found that media coverage during the campaign was “equal” because all the candidates running were mentioned – ignoring the well-documented fact that Medvedev was “mentioned” many times more often than his rivals – who were they anyway? – and much more positively).

At the court hearing today, a deputy prosecutor-general argued that since the violations were “procedural,” the court should simply reprimand the individual prosecutors and judges who made the illegal decisions and move on. This may well be an indication of which way this ruling will play out, since Medvedev has shown a penchant lately for ostentatiously dismissing some officials every time something goes wrong (after all, he has to do this, since the prosecutors and courts are so corrupted, they can’t be trusted to handle, say, the investigation into a night-club fire in Perm without presidential intervention).

As a result of Medvedev’s decisive interventions, a lot of officials who probably should be sitting in jail are simply sent home, and many of them will likely turn up in nice positions sooner rather than later.

Medvedev’s approach to real systemic issues – whether because he is uninterested in undertaking meaningful reform or because he is powerless to do so – is almost always to tweak or bandage or fire. Analyst Nikolai Petrov pointed this out in a piece in “The Moscow Times” yesterday on Medvedev’s proposed tweaks to the system of appointing (rather than electing) heads of federation subjects. “Medvedev is correct in saying the present system…is ineffective,” Petrov writes. “The solution, however, is not to patch over the problems in the system, but to change the system entirely.”

Systemic problems demands systemic solutions.

Within hours of today’s Supreme Court ruling, gazeta.ru (where Medvedev debuted his much-commented “Forward, Russia!” manifesto in September) threw down the gauntlet for the young president. The ruling, gazeta.ru wrote in an editorial, is a “historic chance” for Medvedev to begin the process of ending the so-called Basmanny justice – named after the Moscow district court that is most known for handing down legally outrageous, but consistently Kremlin-friendly verdicts.

The editorial points out to the president the key, obvious point: “It is precisely the Russian authorities that are the main source of legal nihilism, by going directly against the law in every possible way from the redistribution of property to the mass of day-to-day crimes of the siloviki against the population to the alteration of the country’s political system.” It asserts that the entire Yukos affair – the cases against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Lebedev, and many others – is characteristic of “the Putin-style dealings with the law enforcement organs, where were transformed into an instrument for divvying up business to the advantage of a narrow circle close to power or occupying official posts under the political cover of the head of the government.”

Although today’s decision, so far, appears merely to be a sop to the Strasbourg court, it is a chance for Medvedev to (finally!) move from “rhetorical pronouncements about the need to modernize the country to real actions.”

The article concludes that Medvedev can begin by directing the Duma (and let’s not be coy and pretend there is a separation of legislative and executive power in Russia) to ratify the 14th Protocol of the European Court of Human Rights, which is aimed at “preventing violations at national level and improving domestic remedies.” Russia is the only Council of Europe member country that has not ratified the 2004 reform and ratification has been blocked by the Kremlin precisely because Russia consistently loses cases brought before the court because of the depredations of Basmanny justice.

But don’t hold your breath. Medvedev has let dozens of “litmus tests” of his liberal views pass since he became president. There is no reason to think things will be different this time, especially since the matter goes straight to the heart of Russia’s unaccountable and thoroughly corrupted political system, one that needs more than just a good tweaking.

-- Robert Coalson

Will there be a new U.S.-Russian strategic arms reduction treaty or not?

Outwardly, politicians on both sides seem to be trying to keep up the momentum for an agreement, even though the December 5 lapsing of the 1991 START agreement has come and gone and there seems no chance that anything will be nailed down by the revised deadline of the end of the year.

Yesterday, at an end-of-the-year presser, Federation Council International Affairs Committee Chairman Mikhail Margelov said the two sides are “half a step away” from completing the treaty. Margelov named the “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations as the key event of 2009.

At a similar event today, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov described the proposed agreement as “radical and unprecedented,” but backed away from speculating on when it might be signed.

But one can detect a dissonant note under some of the optimistic rhetoric. Lavrov hyped the new agreement as being “of a fundamentally new quality” that “envisions equal rights and symmetric measures of control.” He seemed to be implying that the 1991 agreement -- which has been hailed as a cornerstone of global security by Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama -- was somehow defective.

This note was struck directly by Russia’s Chief of the General Staff Nikolai Makarov, who said yesterday that: “For Russia, the previous agreement was harmful. We want to conclude a fair agreement that will ensure the security of both countries.” He expressed hope that a new agreement will be signed in early 2010.

There has long been informed speculation that the Russian military is less than thrilled about the prospect of a new agreement, which reportedly will cut warheads to 1,500-1,675 (see also, here). Analysts say, pointing to the August 2008 war in Georgia, that Russia is not ready to rely on its conventional military as its main deterrent.

By emphasizing the “half step” and the “radical and unprecedented” nature of the agreement, Moscow may be preparing the ground to blame Washington if the talks collapse.

The rhetoric Moscow is using in recent days is also similar to what it deployed when Medvedev was pushing his draft treaty on European security – namely, the idea that it was necessary to radically overhaul existing agreements which Russia argues are outdated and even counterproductive. Medvedev’s proposal seems to be part of a broader Russian strategy of undermining the post-Cold War institutions that it sees as propping up the unipolar world.

It will be interesting to see if the nuclear-arms talks break down because Moscow insists on a “radical” proposal that is as much of a nonstarter as Medvedev’s draft treaty. It would also be interesting if Moscow would spell out what the problems are with START-1 and why a “radical and unprecedented” departure is needed.

On the other side of the Atlantic, “The Washington Times” is reporting that 41 U.S. senators – all the Republicans and independent Joseph Lieberman – have signed a letter to Obama saying “we don’t believe further reductions can be in the national security interest of the U.S. in the absence of a significant program to modernize our nuclear deterrent.” (See also, here.)

The senators – and there are enough of them to block ratification of any treaty in the Senate – told the president that any treaty must be submitted together with a plan for upgrading existing weapons, developing “a modern warhead,” and modernizing the country’s main weapons-development facilities.

All in all, despite Moscow’s professed “optimism” on bilateral relations, I’m starting to feel increasingly skeptical that we’ll be seeing anything more than a face-saving accord any time soon.
 

-- Robert Coalson