Thursday, February 16, 2012

The Power Vertical

TEXT SIZE - +

The Real Police Reform

Riot police, with a shiny new truck, breaking up a demonstration against election falsification in Moscow in October.

Although the topic of police reform in Russia never seems to go away, it has been in the spotlight for some weeks now, at least since the sensational videos posted by former police Major Aleksei Dymovsky with allegations of massive police corruption in Novorossiisk. United Russia Duma Deputy Aleksei Makarov even proposed “abolishing” the police force and starting over – “with help from civil society and human rights groups” (too bad they have all been neutered).

(Some sadly telling indicators of the need for police reform have emerged in recent days with the arrest of police Lieutenant Artur Kositsyn on charges of committing multiple rapes. According to “The Moscow Times,” Kositsyn failed a routine psych test for the Moscow traffic police and his bosses, instead of firing him, transferred him to the Moscow suburb of Podolsk. How much did he pay? According to the same report, Kositsyn offered arresting officers a bribe of $50,000 to release him – a tidy sum for a lowly traffic cop.)

Of course, the main problem with fighting police corruption is that the police force is the main prop of Russia’s corrupt, unaccountable, and antidemocratic political regime, as New York University Professor Mark Galeotti has argued in an RFE/RL commentary: “The police are still seen as an essentially political tool and everyone from the Kremlin down to municipal authorities seem to prize loyalty over professionalism.” (See also my previous post about the police role in foisting off the falsified October regional elections.)

Today the website “Yezhednevny zhurnal” posted the latest in an excellent series of articles on measures the Russian government is taking to secure itself (to see the list of other pieces in this series, click here). This latest article details police reforms that have actually been going on for at least the last five years and that seem to have very little to do with the stated goals of fighting “organized crime, terrorism, and extremism” (unless you define “extremism,” as the Russian government often does, as “opposing the government”).

The report, which is backed up by Interior Ministry documents, notes that in 2003 the Ministry had 98 OMON units, the special troops that are used in the event of mass disorders or major security breakdowns (by comparison, the Soviet Interior Ministry had just 19 such units in 1988). By 2007, the ministry reported 121 OMON units with a total of some 20,000 officers. In addition, the Interior Ministry controls 87 OMSN units [Typo in original corrected, thanks to reader comment -- Robert], which are basically SWAT teams. However, as the article documents, OMSN units have been under a joint command with OMON since the late 1990s and this year the two forces conducted joint training exercises on “disbursing demonstrations” in four regions.

Since 2003, the Interior Ministry has created a police-aviation unit that currently has 30 helicopters, six unmanned drones, five high-altitude surveillance systems, and a dirigible. The ministry has also worked out detailed contingency plans for transferring riot police from one region to another, which it did in the case of the “car protests” in Vladivostok in March.

Ground transportation has also not been ignored. In 2006, the ministry announced plans to purchase “more than 5,500 armored vehicles” The same year, the police took delivery of 122 armored patrol buses. In 2007, the Ural Factory, which produces the vehicles, announced a production jump of nearly 60 percent and reported it was working on two shifts for the first time since 1992.

The budget for police special forces was doubled in 2005. The article concludes its summary of the equipment the Interior Ministry has purchased over the last five years or so by noting one common feature: “none of them are designed for combating organized crime.”

The “Yezhdnevny zhurnal” expose ends by noting that their research did not cover the ministry’s so-called internal troops (VV), which are also sometimes used to quell public disorder. As a rule, though, the VV forces have a different mission: “If OMON troops must reestablish political control lost as a result of peaceful mass actions, the internal troops become involved when there is an armed uprising.” So, the authors conclude, “parallel to the OMON empire a multilevel machine of internal troops is also developing, with its own special units, aviation, armored units, crisis-command centers, and so on.”

This, then, is the concrete, specific “police reform” that the Kremlin has made its top priority over the last few years, as demonstrated not least by the amount of money that has been devoted to it. Who says the talk of reform is all a lot of hot air?

-- Robert Coalson

Tags:police, reform, Russia

A 'Functioning' System

President Medvedev is proud of Russia's mutliparty system.

Posted At: 10 December 13:37

During his November 12 Address to the Federal Assembly, President Dmitry Medvedev devoted an entire section to the window-dressing of Russia’s managed democracy. True, the section came way down in the speech, far below bits on “innovation” and “modernization.” In fact, talk about the country’s fake political system ranked above only other such embarrassing topics as reforming the police and military and instability in the North Caucasus (about the latter, Medvedev said he considers it “our most serious domestic political problem,” making it hard to understand why he took nearly 10,000 words to get around to it).

As if he were inventing the wheel, Medvedev boldly called for new laws restricting the abuse of absentee ballots and ensuring equal access to the media for all parties (he didn’t mention that when opposition parties complained about massively biased media coverage of his own 2008 election, the courts ruled that coverage had been “equal” because all candidates had been mentioned).

In short, Medvedev offered what can only be called tweaks to a political system he sees as functioning properly. Following the regional elections in October that were grossly falsified by the ruling United Russia party, Medvedev said the trumped-up results had given the party “the moral authority to govern.” (Again, to bring up the inconvenient issue of his own fraudulent election, the authors of the recent and highly recommended “The Forensics Of Election Fraud” write that they did not include an analysis of the 2008 election “for the simple reason that calling it an election denigrates the meaning of the word…. We are not required to participate in the Kremlin’s farce by analyzing data from its 2008 presidential vote as if it were a true election.”)

In his Federal Assembly address, Medvedev praised the Putin-era political system, saying: “Today we can say that the multiparty system has evolved throughout the Russian Federation. It has become a stable, functioning, national political institution, the most important tool for ensuring the fundamental rights and freedoms of our people, including their exclusive right to power.”

“The political parties currently operating in our country have passed the test of time. As they fought for votes and voters' trust they have become stronger, and become truly popular,” Medvedev concluded.

The fictions about Russia’s “functioning” multiparty system were effectively exposed in a nice commentary this week on gazeta.ru by political scientists Arkady Lyubarev and Aleksandr Kynev. The authors don’t need to go into the details of the manipulation of elections over the Putin era in order to show exactly how this system is “functioning.” (The reader comments to this article are also well worth taking a look at.)

When the Putin-Medvedev reform of the political system began, there were 46 parties in Russia. The argument was that the large number of small (often ego-driven) parties was weakening the political system. The people, so the claim went, would be better represented by a few large parties. So, many policies were instituted to force political consolidation.

(Interestingly, one of the main mechanisms by which parties naturally combine – the formation of electoral blocs and the creation of joint election lists – was expressly banned under the so-called consolidation reforms, since the Kremlin was more interested in having parties it could control than in having a genuine multiparty system.)

Among them was the artificial creation of the A Just Russia party out of several smaller, but genuinely independent parties with their own constituencies. As Lyubarev and Kynev point out, A Just Russia has consistently polled less support in national and local elections than the main party that it subsumed, Rodina (Motherland). In the 2007 Duma elections, A Just Russia was given 7.7 percent, while Rodina polled 9 percent in 2003.

No wonder the Communist Party has found laughable repeated suggestions by A Just Russia leader Sergei Mironov that they join his feckless party.

The money shot in the Lyubarev/Kynev article is the chart produced at the end that summarizes the results of national elections from 195 to 2007 (considering just the party-list votes). During that period, the number of parties participating in the elections fell from 43 to 11. In 1995, the top seven parties received 63.9 percent of the vote, with the first place party polling 22.3 percent. In 2007, the top seven parties received 96.7 percent of the vote, with the top party (Putin’s United Russia) being given 64.3 percent. That is, United Russia in 2007 polled virtually the same as the top seven parties in 1995. And, most tellingly, the figures for the other six parties on the lists barely budged over the entire period.

The authors note that in many regional elections before Medvedev’s multiparty system started “functioning,” five or even six parties managed to get more than 7 percent of the vote (although back then, parties only needed 5 percent to get seats). In the elections in October, in two of the three federation subjects holding regional elections, only three parties reached 7 percent and in one of them, only two managed it.

“To sum up,” the authors write, “today we have seven parties, but the chances for three of them to gain seats in legislative bodies is extremely small – much smaller than it was before. Those three parties are balancing on the brink of disappearing.”

The authors speculate that the bandages Medvedev proposed to tweak this “functioning” system are intended to prevent more parties from becoming extinct in order to maintain the façade of multiparty democracy. “Apparently a further reduction in the number of parties is not part of the Kremlin’s plan,” they write. However, they express skepticism that Medvedev’s proposed measures will be sufficient to staunch the bleeding.

I’ll end with a quotation from the aforementioned “The Forensics Of Election Fraud”: “If with earlier [before Putin] elections, we suspected fraud in much the same way as a police officer might suspect drunk driving when he sees a car weaving and swerving inexplicably down the highway, in Russia’s most recent elections it is as if the driver is now tossing his empty beer cans out the window. The Kremlin may choose to argue that voting in Russia constitutes a free, fair, and democratic process, and they are free to do so. But we are not required to accept their assertions.”

-- Robert Coalson

Kalashnikov In The Kremlin

Maksim Kalashnikov laments "the collapse of the first Soviet Union."

Posted At: 09 December 15:09

RFE/RL’s Russian Service has been reporting steadily in recent weeks about the inroads that a certain Maksim Kalashnikov has been making in getting his views on Russia’s future heard at the highest levels in the Kremlin.

In October, at the personal request of President Dmitry Medvedev, Kalashnikov laid out his ideas in a long meeting with presidential chief of staff Sergei Sobyanin. Sobyanin later said he had forwarded Kalashnikov’s ideas to the Russian Academy of Sciences for its recommendation.

On December 4, Kalashnikov again visited the Kremlin, this time for a face-to-face with Sobyanin’s deputy, Vladislav Surkov, who oversees domestic political arrangements. Asked to comment on that meeting by RFE/RL, Kalashnikov said he wouldn’t talk to “you dogs” and referred our reporter to his blog.

RFE/RL’s correspondent phoned the presidential press service to ask about Surkov’s conversation with Kalashnikov and got a classic run-around. The press service gave the correspondent a number to call and the gruff-sounding man who answered the phone insisted that all information is distributed only by the press service. “So they gave you my number,” he said. “But all our contact with the mass media takes place through our respected and entirely remarkable press service.”

“I don’t know who Maksim Kalashnikov is,” the bureaucrat added, “because I only work with papers.” (Interestingly, although Medvedev mentioned Kalashnikov’s meeting with Sobyanin on television and Sobyanin has said he forwarded Kalashnikov’s projects to the Academy of Sciences and Kalashnikov has told RFE/RL that he met with Sobyanin – despite all these things, a spokesman in Sobyanin’s office told RFE/RL “there was no such meeting.”)

So who is Maksim Kalashnikov? A provocative blogger who has praise for Hitler and Stalin. A futurologist whose many books envision a restored Russian empire that seems a lot like a non-ideological Soviet Union (his 2003 book “Forward To The USSR-2” echoes the reform plans originally touted by Yury Andropov in the early 1980s). Former RFE/RL analyst Victor Yasmann wrote about Kalashnikov’s works here, here, and here.

Kalashnikov is a leading figure of the Moscow-based Institute of Dynamic Conservatism (the director of the institute, Andrei Kobyakov, is best known for his 2003 treatise, “The Sunset Of The Empire Of The Dollar And The End Of The Pax Americana”). Under his real name, Vladimir Kucherenko, Kalashnikov is an author of a 2008 manifesto called “The Russian Doctrine,” a pre-publication version of which was endorsed in 2007 by then-Metropolitan and now-Patriarch Kirill (see also, here).

He has blamed the “Jewish wing of the Bolshevik party” for detaching Ukraine from Russia and said in an interview with RFE/RL that “Josef Vissarionovich [Stalin], thank God, suffocated that wing.”

In an essay appended to the print edition of “The Russian Doctrine” and entitled “Russia’s Chance In The 21st century: Breaking Out Of The Global Time Of Troubles,” Kalashnikov begins with an account of how U.S. global hegemony in the wake of the end of the Cold War is collapsing. He compares the situation of the United States today with that of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, “losing its zone of vital interests” and undergoing economic paroxysms. “We are standing on the threshold of incredible events, a historic collapse…. And the United States does not have the power to stop this.”

Kalashnikov then proceeds to say that this collapse affects not only the United States, but “the entire white race.” He repeats the “sad joke” that “in American universities, Russian professors are teaching Chinese students at the expense of U.S. taxpayers.

But in all this turbulence, Kalashnikov sees an opportunity for Russia – “Once again God is sending us a great opportunity.” Russia, he writes, was the first country to enter this new “Time of Troubles,” the first to be deprived of “a great country (the USSR) and powerful industry.” The first to feel the effects of “the new barbarism” and to endure the “degradation of society” and the individual. As a result, he believes Russia can be the first to emerge from the crisis, while “Europe lies in a profound morass and the United States simply may not be preserved as a whole country.”

In fact, Kalashnikov’s views in many particulars echo those of former KGB analyst Igor Panarin, who has made a name for himself predicting the collapse of the United States (Panarin has found eager audiences among some conservatives in the United States recently, many of whom applaud his comparisons between U.S. President Barack Obama and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev). In 2006, Panarin’s website published a proposal for the unification of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Armenia by 2008. By 2010, according to the plan, the new state would include Mongolia, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, and Bulgaria, and by 2014, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, North and South Korea, and all of Eastern Europe would have signed up to join this Eurasian Rus.

“Dynamic conservatism” indeed!

(Kalashnikov and Panarin are part of a general resurgence of Russian "conservatism" that I wrote about here, where I highlighted the challenges this ideology poses to liberal notions such as the idea that there are universal human rights.)

Kalashnikov wraps all the geopolitics up in paeans to the power of advanced technologies (he uses the phrase “nanotechnology” almost as often as Medvedev himself). Now, it appears, his views have attracted Medvedev’s attention. It will be interesting to see what emerges when the ideas of the author of “Forward, Russia!” merge with those of the author of “Forward To The USSR-2.”

-- Robert Coalson

Tags:kalashnikov, conservatism, medvedev, Russia

Climategate: A Russian Connection?

Posted At: 07 December 17:40

Was the so-called "climategate" scandal initiated by the Russian security services?

A story today in the British daily "The Independent" suggests this might be the case:

The computer hack, said a senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, was not an amateur job, but a highly sophisticated, politically motivated operation. And others went further. The guiding hand behind the leaks, the allegation went, was that of the Russian secret services.

In November, an unknown hacker, or hackers, accessed the server of the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England and disseminated over one thousand e-mails and other documents from over a 13-year period.

"The Independent" reports that the e-mails -- which climate-change skeptics say prove that researchers manipulated their data in order to exaggerate the threat of global warming -- were originally posted on a server in Tomsk owned by an Internet security company called Tomcity:

The FSB security services, descendants of the KGB, are believed to invest significant resources in hackers, and the Tomsk office has a record of issuing statements congratulating local students on hacks aimed at anti-Russian voices, deeming them "an expression of their position as citizens, and one worthy of respect". The Kremlin has also been accused of running coordinated cyber attacks against websites in neighboring countries such as Estonia, with which the Kremlin has frosty relations, although the allegations were never proved.

"It's very common for hackers in Russia to be paid for their services," Professor Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, said in Copenhagen at the weekend. "It's a carefully made selection of emails and documents that's not random. This is 13 years of data, and it's not a job of amateurs."

The newspaper notes that "many in Russia's scientific community are deeply skeptical of the threat of global warming" and suggests that Moscow is less than interested in a strong global pact emerging from Copenhagen:

Much of Russia's vast oil and gas reserves lie in difficult-to-access areas of the far North. One school of thought is that Russia, unlike most countries, would have little to fear from global warming, because these deposits would suddenly become much easier and cheaper to access.

It is this, goes the theory, that underlies the Kremlin's ambivalent attitudes towards global warming; they remain lukewarm on the science underpinning climate change, knowing full well that if global warming does change the world's climate, billions of dollars of natural resources will become accessible. Another motivating factor could be that Russia simply does not want to spend the vast sums of money that would be required to modernize and "greenify" Russia's ageing factories.

The story was also covered by Britain's "The Daily Telegraph" and "The Mail On Sunday." And it has been picked up by the Russian online media.

Some conservative British bloggers, meanwhile, are casting doubt on the alleged Russian connection.

James Demingpole at "The Daily Telegraph" calls it "a glorious red herring, designed both to impugn the motives of the people who leaked the CRU files and to distract from the significance of the files' contents."

Another conservative blogger, Richard North, says that the fact that the e-mails we posted on the Tomsk server does not prove that Moscow had a hand in their dissemination:

From the very start, then, the crucial issue is that this is a publicly-accessible server which can be reached from anywhere in the world. Furthermore, Russian servers are particularly attractive to people who wish to lodge material on the internet anonymously, as the Russian authorities are distinctly unhelpful when it comes to revealing the addresses of computers used to upload material onto servers in their territory.

Thus, the fact that the material was placed on a Russian server gives no clue whatsoever as to the identity of the person (or persons) who uploaded the material, or of their location. The newspapers, therefore, have to invent a connection and a 'motive' in order to forge a link.

Now we at the Power Vertical love a good old cloak-and-dagger-style FSB-conspiracy yarn as much as anybody (actually, probably more than anybody). Our experience also tells us that the FSB is certainly capable of such an operation. And Russia, a major gas and oil exporter, certainly has motive to derail a new global climate pact

But the evidence presented thus far is a bit thin and circumstantial. But this does merit keeping an eye on and we'll follow up if something more substantial turns up. If any readers come across anything, either supporting or debunking the alleged Russia connection, give us a shout in comments or by e-mail.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:tomsk, hackers, climategate, Russia

The Tandem Two-Step

President Dmitry Medvedev (left) with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at a restaurant in St. Petersburg on November 21.

Posted At: 03 December 16:38

Half of Russia's ruling tandem was in Moscow and the other half was in Rome.

But the geographic distance wasn't enough to prevent a cross border conversation between President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and about which of them will occupy the Kremlin after 2012.

At a nationally televised question and answer session with carefully vetted ordinary Russians today, Putin said he would "think about it" when asked if he planned to seek the presidency in 2012. And when asked about whether he had any plans to retire from politics and enjoy a quiet life, he deadpanned: "Don't hold your breath."

It wasn't long for that news to travel south to the Italian capital, where Medvedev was holding a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"Prime Minister Putin said he doesn't rule out this possibility and I also say I don't rule it out," Medvedev said when asked about Putin's comment. "But this is only if Mr. Medvedev and Mr. Putin have a chance," he added, pretending for his Italian hosts that Russian elections are anything but heavily choreographed and predetermined events.

But the symmetry didn't stop there. Putin went out of his way to stress his close ties and good working relationship with Medvedev:

We have known each other many, many years. Both of us graduated from the same university, learned from one and the same professors, who instilled in us not only knowledge but a similar approach to life.

And here's Medvedev in Rome: "We are close to each other and work well together. We can come to an agreement. We will take a reasonable decision."

Wow. It's almost as if the whole thing were...orchestrated.

You can read our recap of the Putin show here.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:2012, Vladimir Putin, medvedev, election, Putin-Medvedev tandem

Live From Moscow, It's The Putin Show!

A shop assistant in Moscow watches Vladimir Putin answering questions during a live call-in show in October 2007.

Posted At: 02 December 16:27

There he is dressed in his best everyman outfit, a light blue shirt and grey windbreaker. He impatiently taps his fingers on a table and glares out at his audience. "Why does everybody scurry around like cockroaches whenever I show up?"

And there he is again, reassuring nervous auto workers and greeting farmers. And look! There he is scolding bureaucrats.

It's that time of year again -- time for Vladimir Putin's annual live question and answer session with carefully screened and meticulously vetted ordinary citizens.

And to make sure nobody forgets to tune in Thursday December 3 at noon Moscow time, Russian television has produced this slick campaign-style advertisement portraying Putin as a tough, no-nonsense -- although sometimes wisecracking -- man of action and man of the people.

According to "Nezavisimaya gazeta," the session will focus mainly on economically troubled "mono-cities" that are dependent on single industries.

One video link will be set up with the city of Pikalyovo, where the troubled BazEl Cement company recently announced it might be forced to stop production. Pikalevo made headlines in May when residents, angry about unpaid back wages, stormed the mayors office and blocked a federal highway.

In an attempt to cast himself as the town's savior, Putin showed up in June and publicly dressed down BazEl's main owner, Oleg Deripaska, and the wage arrears were quickly paid out (Putin's comments about people scurrying like cockroaches, featured prominently in the Russian TV ad, were made during his visit to Pikalyovo).

Studios will also reportedly be set up in Tolyatti, home of the troubled AvtoVaz car manufacturer; in Sayano-Shushenskaya, where a massive explosion at a hydro-electric plant in August killed 75 people; and in Vladivostok, where large demonstrations against an auto-import tax spooked the Kremlin.

There will also, no doubt, be plenty of staged cutesy moments, like the exchange during last year's program when a little girl from the Buryat Republic in Siberia called in and asked Putin for a Cinderella dress for New Year's Eve -- and got an invitation to the Kremlin.

The Power Vertical be watching the whole thing on Thursday (last year, it was a three-hour marathon), and will post a recap when its over.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:town, hall, television, Vladimir Putin

Cops Gone Wild

Demonstration against police abuse in Moscow on November 28: "Militia -- Time to Change"

Posted At: 01 December 18:13

When the nation's top law enforcement official starts sounding a bit like a wild-eyed anarchist, you know something must be up.

Speaking to a group of students last week, Russian Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev said citizens should be allowed to strike back at police who attack them without cause:

May a citizen hit back at a policeman who has attacked him? Yes he may; if he is not a criminal, if he is walking along quietly and breaking no rules...We are all equal, and a citizen is doubly equal...If there is an attack then there should be self-defense. When a police officer attacks, then he is a criminal in uniform who should be isolated and put in jail.

Also last week, State Duma Deputy Andrei Makarov, a leading member of the ruling United Russia party, upped the ante, suggesting at a press conference that maybe it was time to scrap the country's massive 921,000-strong police force altogether and start over:

You can neither modernize nor reform the Interior Ministry. You can only abolish it. The whole police force needs to be decommissioned and cleansed with help from civil society and human rights groups.

It has indeed been rough going for Russian law enforcement in recent weeks.

There was Novorossiisk police Captain Aleksei Dymovsky's YouTube video alleging massive corruption, brutality, and falsification of evidence.

There was the suspicious death of imprisoned attorney Sergei Magnitsky, who was reportedly denied medical care after refusing to give evidence against his own client.

And there was the case of three drunken Moscow police officers who were detained after beating an Abkhaz man to death.

Russia's police have been under fire -- and intense scrutiny -- since April, when Denis Yevsyukov, a Moscow police officer, killed three people and wounded six more in a drunken shooting rampage at a supermarket. President Dmitry Medvedev fired Moscow's police chief several days after the shooting.

In May, Supreme Court Chairman Vycheslav Lebedev and Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov issued a report singling out the Interior Ministry as Russia's most corrupt institution.

But the current rumblings in high places are likely the result of something other than a sincere desire to reform the law enforcement system. The latest wave of high-profile cases notwithstanding, police corruption and brutality in Russia are nothing new. What is new, however, is the attention the issue is receiving from the elite.

The latest wave of police scandals come at a time of intense clan warfare in the Kremlin, as security-service veterans or "siloviki" surrounding Prime Minister Vladimir Putin battle for influence with technocrats close to President Dmitry Medvedev over Russia's future political and economic direction.

Nurgaliyev is closely associated with the siloviki and there has been persistent speculation in the Russian media and on the Internet that his job could be in jeopardy.

Political analyst Andrei Piontkovsky told "The Moscow Times" that Makarov's proposal to disband the Interior Ministry could be interpreted as an attempt by people close to Medvedev to weaken the siloviki:

Makarov is an important ideologist within United Russia, and I’m sure his statement was not made by chance, but organized in circles close to Medvedev. Everybody hates the police today. If he can solve that problem, he can get 90 percent support and also reform the security services.

Makarov's proposal has divided the ruling party. Some in United Russia distanced themselves from his comments. Andrei Pisarev, the political head of the party's executive committee, said they reflected Makarov's personal opinion and not that of United Russia. But he did get a nod of support from Deputy Duma Speaker Lyubov Sliska, who said, "there is no sense in reforming the Interior Ministry and perhaps a political decision should be made to take the steps proposed by Makarov."

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:brutality, nurgaliyev, makarov, police, Russia, corruption

Antifa Strikes Back

Ivan Khutorskoi in an October 2009 photo, one month before his death

Posted At: 19 November 13:48

Veteran human rights activists today appealed to Russia's increasingly assertive anti-racist movement to forswear violence, even as they face increasingly lethal attacks from militant nationalist groups.

The public appeal -- signed by such luminaries as Lyudmila Alekseeva of the Moscow Helsinki Group, Aleksandr Cherkasov of Memorial, Lev Ponomarev of For Human Rights, and the liberal clergyman Gleb Yakunin -- called on the anti-fascist groups (who call themselves Antifa) "not to succumb to provocations, to renounce violence, and not to become a bargaining chip in a dirty game."

They warned that violent retaliations against nationalists would "give law enforcement authorities a pretext for new repressions," which may have been "the goal of provocateurs."

The rights activists spoke out in the hyper charged atmosphere following the shooting death of Antifa leader Ivan Khutorskoi, a former punk rocker known by his nickname "The Bonebreaker." Khutorskoi was shot twice in the back of the head in the stairwell of his Moscow apartment building on November 16.

Antifa groups responded the next day by attacking the office of the pro-Kremlin youth group Young Russia, pelting the building with stones, trash, and steel rods. Antifa activists say Young Russia has close ties with Russky Obraz, an ultranationalist group they believe was behind Khutorskoi's killing.

A social worker by profession, Khutorskoi was known for organizing underground bare-knuckle boxing matches. He also provided security for Antifa events, as well as sometimes for human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov's press conferences.

Khutorskoi, however, was not present at Markelov's press conference in January, after which the lawyer and "Novaya gazeta" journalist Anastasia Baburova were shot dead.

Prior to his death on Monday, Khutorskoi had reportedly survived attempts to kill him -- once with a knife, once with a razor, and once with a screwdriver.

Antifa activists said nationalist groups had been posting Khutorskoi's address on the Internet and encouraging attacks against him.

Aleksandr Verkhovsky, director of the Sova Center, a watchdog group that monitors racial attacks, told "The New York Times" that Antifa groups have recently begun adopting the tactics of their enemies, carrying out attacks against known nationalists.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:khutorskoi, antifa, Russia

A Few Bad Men

A demonstration for police reform in May 2009

Posted At: 13 November 13:19

The following reader comment (from Brian in Colorado) was posted to my recent story on whistleblower cop Aleksei Dymovsky:

Dymovsky's allegations ring very true to anyone who has ever spent any time in Russia, outside of luxury hotels in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The comment that "The public fear the police even more than hooligans and criminals" jibes completely with my experiences in Russia. It should also be said that the public fear the police much more than hooligans and, especially, criminals do.

Although, I personally, only experienced minor and humorous bribery requests from the Russian police, the experiences in Russia of other American acquaintances with the corrupt and incompetent legal system makes me somewhat afraid to again visit a country whose hospitality and culture I very much enjoyed, at least not until Putin and the siloviki have been deposed and/or jailed.

Having lived in Russia throughout most of the 1990s, I can say that this comment is spot on.

But the problem of corrupt and abusive cops long preceded the rise of Vladimir Putin and the siloviki and it will probably not go away once they leave the scene. In fact, it was endemic throughout the supposedly liberal years of Boris Yeltsin's presidency.

Reading this comment, I was reminded of a summer night in St. Petersburg in the late 1990s. Some friends and I had just finished dinner at a downtown restaurant and decided to go for a walk. Somebody suggested we stroll down Nevsky Prospect, the city's bustling main drag. But a Russian friend quickly nixed that idea saying he didn't feel safe walking down Nevsky at that hour. "There are too many police there," he said.

Everybody nodded in agreement. We walked down the Fontanka Embankment instead.

Reflecting on the exchange later, I was bothered that I had internalized this fear of the police that is second nature to many Russians. "I've been in this country too long," I thought.

The fear was nonetheless rational. Most of us had had unpleasant experiences with the police ourselves or knew somebody who had.

An American accountant I knew was robbed twice by police officers. A Finnish journalist was snatched off the street for no apparent reason, and taken to a police precinct where he was brutally beaten and robbed. A Russian friend was picked up and press ganged into the Army.

A favorite trick in those days was for police to stop somebody for a routine document check. After examining your papers, they would then say they had to inspect your wallet for narcotics (because everybody hides narcotics in their wallet, right?). During this "inspection" they would then take any money they happened to find and hand the wallet back. It was brazen and there was little one could do about it. You had two choices: either let them get away with it or make a stand and risk being detained for resisting a police officer.

One Russian photographer I knew told me how his brother was fired from the traffic police for not taking bribes. Every cop on the street, he was told, was expected to collect bribes -- and turn kick most of the proceeds upstairs to their superiors.

This, in fact, is a metaphor for how Russia's whole economy works. The only difference between the Yeltsin and the Putin era is that the system has become much more centralized -- and expensive. Russians now pay an estimated $300 billion in bribes annually -- a tenfold increase over 2001.

This problem is not a matter of a few bent cops. It is systemic.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:police, Russia, corruption, dymovsky

Cops, Corporations, And Clans

Police officer Aleksei Dymovsky speaks at a press conference in Moscow.

Posted At: 12 November 17:22

A police officer in Novorossiisk posts videos on the Internet alleging widespread police malfeasance and corruption.

Prosecutor General Yury Chaika announces that 22 criminal cases have been opened in connection with the activities of the mammoth state corporation Russian Technologies.

What do these two events that made headlines in Russia this past week have in common?

Each appears to weaken -- or could be interpreted as an attempt to weaken -- a key member of the "siloviki" clan of security service veterans that have dominated Russian politics for the past decade.

There has been a lot of debate and speculation about whether Police Major Aleksei Dymovsky acted of his own volition or was working at the behest of somebody in high places when he posted three videos to the Internet blowing the whistle on how Russian law-enforcement routinely fabricate criminal cases.

But there is no doubt that Dymovsky's You Tube broadside against his superiors has touched a nerve in Russian society and put Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev on the spot.

More than two-thirds of Russians already tell pollsters that they do not trust the police. The Interior Ministry is still reeling from a series of corruption scandals in the regions and from a Moscow police officer's shooting rampage at a Moscow supermarket in April. Adding to the woes, two more police officers have come forward with videos making similar allegations to those made by Dymovsky.

The criminal cases involving Russian Technologies are the result of an ongoing campaign by President Dmitry Medvedev to rein in state corporations as a whole.

The state corporations -- Russian Technologies, the bank VEB, the nanotechnology firm Rosnano, the nuclear agency Rosatom, the Olympic construction firm Olympstroi, the Housing Maintenance Fund, and the Deposit Insurance Agency -- were supposed to form the backbone of Putin's authoritarian modernization of Russia's economy.

They were given access to massive funds, were allowed to operate with little oversight, and were exempt from disclosure requirements.

But Medvedev and Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin see the state corporations as a drain on the economy and are trying to bring them to heel.

In August, Medvedev ordered Chaika to start an investigation into the state corporations with the first target being Russian Technologies, which is headed by the powerful former KGB officer Sergei Chemezov.

Both Nurgaliyev and Chemezov are part of the siloviki clan and both are close allies of its informal leader, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin.

As we have blogged here, a recent report by Stratfor.com claims that Russia's power elite is currently divided into two main clans.

Sechin's clan, the so-called siloviki, is comprised mainly of officials with either KGB pasts or connections.

In addition to Nurgaliyev and Chemezov, it includes figures like Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev, Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov, and Kremlin Chief of Staff Sergei Naryshkin.

The siloviki clan's main rival is one led by Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov and it includes officials like Prosecutor-General Chaika, Gazprom CEO Aleksei Miller, and Emergency Situations Minister Sergei Shoigu.

According to Stratfor.com, Surkov has teamed up with Kudrin and other technocrats like Sperbank head German Gref and Economics Minister Elvira Nabiullina in an effort to weaken Sechin.

Specifically, Surkov wants to use the economic reforms proposed by Kudring and Co. and Medvedev's anti-corruption campaign to purge Sechin and his allies from the commanding heights of the Russian economy.

The campaign against state corporations is widely seen as being a part of this effort. It is not yet clear whether Dymovsky's broadside against the Interior Ministry over police corruption is as well -- but I would not rule it out.

But what is clear is that Sechin's clan suffered a blow this week. We'll be watching closely for a counterpunch.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:yury, siloviki, sergei, kremlin, surkov, chaika, sechin, chemezov, clan, warfare, rashid, nurgaliyev, vladislay, igor, dymovsky, aleksei

Your Own Personal Vertical

Igor Yurgens

Posted At: 02 November 18:45

An influential think tank is advising President Dmitry Medvedev that he needs to establish an alternative power structure answerable only to him in order to reach his goal of modernizing Russia.

In a report for Medvedev, the Institute for Contemporary Development concludes that it will be impossible for the president to carry out any meaningful changes as long as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's siloviki cronies remain in key administrative posts. But attempting to dismantle Putin's vaunted power vertical would be difficult (if not impossible) and destabilizing at this point.

So the institute is advising that Medvedev set up his own personal power vertical.

Here is how "Nezavisimaya gazeta" describes the proposal:

The authors are not recommending the establishment of a shadow Cabinet or parliament. The experts are instead suggesting the formation of command centers to guide the processes of modernization. The centers should be divided into two groups: those dealing with current problems and those in charge of strategic planning. The former will handle the problems that cannot be delayed - homeless children, organized crime, etc. The latter will chart programs such as a new models for education, new concepts of military development, and alternative urban development strategies.

And here is "Nezavisimaya gazeta" quoting directly from the report:

One structure will strive to prevent de-modernization, while the other will carry out modernization as such. They should operate in tandem. It is of utmost importance to leave the regular bureaucracy out of the process of modernization...By and large, structures of both kinds will represent a parallel power vertical that answers directly to the president, reacts to challenges, and maps out future developments. The functions of the regular bureaucracy, in the meantime, will come down to maintenance of the existing social systems - a mission that is vitally important but has nothing to do with modernization.

The Institute for Contemporary Development, of course, is headed by Igor Yurgens, an adviser to Medvedev.

Yurgens made waves back in February by suggesting that Russia's implicit social contract, in which citizens sacrificed political freedoms in exchange for rising living standards, had been abrogated by the financial crisis. Political liberalization, Yurgens said at the time, was necessary if Russia was to emerge from the deepening recession.

His remarks were met with ridicule by Medvedev's powerful deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, the regime's unofficial ideologist and architect of Russia's authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy."

Undeterred, Yurgens and other public intellectuals like Yevgeny Gontmakher, director of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, continued to push for political liberalization in an increasingly public spat with Surkov.

I don't know what to make of the Institute for Contemporary Development's report just yet.

But what is interesting is that it appears just as reports are surfacing that Surkov is trying to make common cause with -- or attempting to co-opt -- key technocrats and economists close to Medvedev in order to enhance his own political position and weaken his opponents in the Kremlin.

Surkov has long been engaged in a low-intensity clan war with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the head of the siloviki clan of security-service veterans surrounding Putin.

According to a report by stratfor.com (which we blogged here), Surkov is supporting economic reforms proposed by Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, and Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina as a means of weakening Sechin's control over key sectors of the economy.

How Yurgens' institute's report fits into this -- if it fits at all -- is anybody's guess at this point.

But after sparring for most of the year, Yurgens and Surkov appear now to share a common enemy -- Sechin and the siloviki.

Surkov, if the stratfor.com report is correct, appears to be proposing that they be taken on directly. Yurgens, on the other hand, is advising Medvedev to work around them.

And Putin, the one voice that really matters, has been characteristically sphinx-like in his silence.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:surkov, yurgens, vladislav, dmitry, igor, medvedev

Gas Or Freedom?

Oleg Panfilov (file photo)

Posted At: 30 October 16:11

Next week the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe is expected to choose a new representative on freedom of the media. Of the six nominees, two are considered to have the best chances: Mikhail Fedotov, the secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists and a coauthor of Russia’s surprisingly liberal mass media law (surprising because it has failed so spectacularly to protect freedom of the press) and Oleg Panfilov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Journalism in Extreme Situations and indefatigable monitor of media-rights violations throughout the former Soviet Union.

On the website “Yezhednevny zhurnal” today, National Circulation-Audit Service head Igor Yakovenko, himself a former Union of Journalists official and a former liberal Duma deputy, posted a nice commentary on the election that made several good points.

First, Yakovenko notes that the OSCE representative on freedom of the media is chosen by the governments whose abuse of media rights that representative should be exposing and condemning, rather than by the journalists he or she should be protecting. This fact means that Fedotov, who was nominated by Russia and who has made many compromises with power over the last 15 years or so, stands a good chance of being elected.

Surely Panfilov’s uncompromising monitoring of press-freedom abuses over the last decade or so is unlikely to win him any votes. As Yakovenko writes, “Those countries that his center monitors will, of course, vote against him.” So, we can count on countries like Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and all of Central Asia to join Russia in electing a toothless representative. Panfilov, incidentally, was nominated by Georgia, a country that has also been the target of some of his principled monitoring (in August 2008, RFE/RL interviewed Panfilov about media coverage of the Russia-Georgia war.)

Yakovenko notes that Fedotov’s main claim to fame, his coauthorship of the Russian media law, came 18 years ago and during that time, many in Russia have undergone “metamorphoses” straight out of Franz Kafka. More recently, Fedotov has been the Kremlin’s man:

On February 4 of this year, the United Nations held a hearing on the Russian government’s report on human rights in our country. The Russian government delegation made a point of bringing along Fedotov to defend the government’s point of view. Which he did, proclaiming from the podium all the guarantees of freedom of speech and journalists rights that exist in Russia and asserting that journalists can defend these rights in the courts. Dozens of murdered Russian journalists did not hear his words. Hundreds of thousands of his colleagues who are still alive did not learn about his statement, because NTV and other independent media have been closed down regardless of the low and without any judicial recourse. Many Russian human rights advocates who were present during this shame were convinced the Fedotov was talking about some other country.

It will be very interesting to see how the Western European countries vote (the OSCE has 56 member states). How many will see backing Moscow’s view on media freedom as a small compromise to make in order to secure a good gas deal or get a pipeline built? Especially since media freedom is, for the most part, not a problem in their countries with their own well-developed civil-society and legal mechanisms. If the Kazakh government doesn’t want a forceful media advocate, then why should France or Britain force one on them? (By the way, Kazakhstan will take over the rotating chairmanship of the OSCE in January.)

Yakovenko’s article is headlined “Europe’s Choice” in a clear reference to William Styron’s novel “Sophie’s Choice.” What will it be, Europe? Deals with Moscow or a chance to improve the lives of millions in the former Soviet Union?

-- Robert Coalson

Tags:Media, OSCE, Russia

A Kremlin Marriage Of Convenience

Dmitry Medvedev (left) and Vladislav Surkov

Posted At: 27 October 18:46

Watching Vladislav Surkov's maneuvers can make your head spin.

One day the powerful deputy Kremlin deputy chief of staff is ridiculing suggestions that Russia needs to open up its political and economic system to deal with the ongoing economic crisis. On another he appears to be supporting that very idea, telling the ruling United Russia party that it needs to share power.

There is widespread agreement among Kremlin watchers that Surkov was somehow involved in the recent walkout in the State Duma by three "opposition" parties to protest alleged falsification in the October 11 local elections. But there is little agreement whether the move was initiated by Surkov to embarrass his foes, or an operation orchestrated by Surkov's opponents designed to weaken him.

Confused yet? Good.

Surkov made news again this week with an interview with the weekly "Itogi" in which he warned that Russia was falling dangerously behind in economic development and risked becoming a "resource power" if the economy is not modernized. In the same interview, Surkov also argued against liberalizing the political system, warning that it could plunge Russia into chaos.

So what is Surkov up to?

In a recently published four-part series titled "The Kremlin Wars," Stratfor.com offers up one possible answer.

According to Stratfor, the Kremlin is divided into two roughly equal clans -- one headed by Surkov and one led by his archrival, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin:

It is the classic balance of power arrangement. So long as these two clans scheme against each other, [Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin's position as the ultimate power is not threatened and the state itself remains strong -- and not in the hands of one power-hungry clan or another.

In an effort to inflict a decisive defeat on Sechin and his "siloviki" clan, Surkov has reportedly teamed up with a group of technocratic economic liberals who are close to President Dmitry Medvedev.

This group of economists and specialists in civil law, who have been dubbed the "civiliki," include Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, Economics Minister Elvira Nabiullina, and Natural Resources Minister Trutnev.

As I have written here, the civiliki also include Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov and other lower-level officials who studied law with Medvedev in St. Petersburg.

Stratfor argues that the economic crisis has led the Russian authorities to rethink the statist and top heavy economic model dominated by Sechin and the siloviki:

The global economic crisis has led the Kremlin to examine its decisions about running Russia's economy, financial sectors and businesses. A group of intellectuals including Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, called the civiliki, want to use the crisis as an opportunity to reform the Russian economy. The civiliki's plan will lead to increased investment and greater efficiency in the economy, but it will also trigger a fresh round of conflict between the Kremlin's two powerful political clans.

Surkov is less interested in economic reform than in buttressing his own power vis-a-vis Sechin. But, according to Stratfor, he sees the value in using the economic reforms proposed by the civiliki to purge Sechin and his allies from the commanding heights of the Russian economy.

One hint that something along these lines might be under way came in August when Medvedev instructed Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to open an investigation into Russia's massive state corporations, a key power base for Sechin.

If Surkov is indeed gearing up for a decisive battle with Sechin and has teamed up with the civiliki to pull it off, this would explain his increased enthusiasm for economic reform. And the last thing he probably wants in such a situation is the unpredictability that any political liberalization would bring (thus the warnings about chaos).

The wild card in the equation, of course, is Putin, who would need to sign off on any campaign of this magnitude -- especially one targeting a close ally like Sechin.

I'm skeptical for the moment. But Stratfor argues convincingly that the economic crisis has shaken up the elite to the degree that such a move is at least plausible:

Economic problems have become so acute that Putin, for the first time since his rise to power in Russia, has had to step back and reassess whether his system of balanced power is the best way to run the country.

Whether it turns out to be right or wrong, whole Stratfor series is thought provoking and well worth a read.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:siloviki, kremlin, clans, surkov, sechin, civiliki, Vladimir Putin, medvedev

Gorbachev Calls Local Elections A Sham

Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev

Posted At: 19 October 17:20

The man who initiated the first competitive elections in the Soviet Union two decades ago has slammed Russia's most recent vote as a sham.

In an interview published today in "Novaya gazeta," Mikhail Gorbachev said the October 11 local elections, which were swept by the pro-Kremlin United Russia party amid massive claims of vote rigging, have damaged trust in the country's political institutions:

This is a complete failure of political strategists, who were guided by the utterly worthless principle that 'it doesn't matter how the people vote; what matters is how we count.' In everyone's eyes, the elections turned into a mockery of the people and showed a deep disrespect for their voices. The party of power gained the result it needed by discrediting political institutions and the very party itself.

Allegations of vote rigging in the October 11 local elections have been backed up in some cases by videotaped evidence.

Gorbachev's comments are the second high-profile attack on the election results.

The election sparked a brief walkout in the State Duma by three parties, the ultranationalist Liberal Democrats (LDPR), the Communists, and A Just Russia. Although, as we have written here and here, this appears to have been inspired more by inter-clan battles in the Kremlin that by any concern for democratic practices.

It is still unclear what motivated Gorbachev, who has been largely supportive of the current regime, to take such a forceful public stand.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:Gorbachev, fraud, election, Russia

The Numbers Game

The graph shows higher support for United Russia in precincts reporting higher turnout.

Posted At: 16 October 15:11

After the December 2007 Duma elections and March 2008 presidential election (hello, Dmitry Medvedev!), some intrepid Russian bloggers and independent election observers performed some heroic work to highlight the extent of the election fraud in

Russia

. I wrote about their work here, paying particular attention to some meticulous statistical analysis that was done. If you want the full story, get a copy of “The Forensics Of Election Fraud: Russia And Ukraine” by U.S.-based professors Mikhail Maygkov and Peter Ordeshook and Dmitry Shakin of Moscow’s Academy of National Economy.

Now Russia’s bloggers are at it again, putting the microscope to the official results of the October 11 Moscow City Duma elections, in which, according to official results United Russia won 66 percent of the vote and 32 of the 35 council seats. That’s right, under the grossly unfair seat-allocation system that they instituted before the vote, 66 percent of the vote translates into 91 percent of the seats. Official turnout in Moscow was put at about 35 percent.

A blogger named kireyev posted on his LiveJournal blog an analysis of all the more than 3,000 polling stations in Moscow, using official data from the Central Election Commission. His figures show compellingly that the higher the reported turnout at a particular polling station, the higher the vote total for United Russia was there. That is, all the “above average” votes seem to have gone to the ruling party.

Kireyev then analyzed the 146 polling stations that reported 20 percent turnout or less, figuring that these precincts had the least fraud, at least in the form of ballot-box stuffing. He found that among these stations, the results were: United Russia, 46 percent; the Communist Party, 21 percent; the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), 9.8 percent; Yabloko, 8.3 percent; A Just Russia, 8 percent; and Patriots of Russia, 3.1 percent.

Another blogger, Andrei A., took Kireyev’s numbers a bit further and calculated that the actual turnout for the Moscow elections was about 20 percent and that United Russia polled about 42 percent. He estimated that the average fraud among all polling stations was 15 percent of the ballots, while the maximum fraud reached more than 30 percent in some precincts.

A third blogger, avmalgin, got a hold of the voter protocols for polling station No. 1,702 in Moscow. That document shows 192 votes for United Russia, 98 for the Communist Party, 50 for A Just Russia, 38 for Yabloko, 37 for the LDPR, and 11 for the Patriots of Russia. However, the website of the Central Election Commission, of which the blogger presents a screenshot, shows the exact same results for all the parties – except for United Russia. By official results, United Russia got 742 votes. That is, United Russia’s percentage was magically raised from 45 percent to 74 percent.

These bloggers and others like them are doing brave work. Central Election Commission head Vladimir Churov has already compared those who are reporting on the fraud to "terrorists" and has threatened to prosecute them.

With any luck, though, we’ll be seeing a lot more of this information in the coming days. If you spot any, please forward them to me.

-- Robert Coalson

Tags:fraud, blogs, Russia, elections

Who You Gonna Call?

Russian police dealing with a Moscow protest against the falsified regional elections.

Posted At: 16 October 14:13

The scandal in the Duma this week, ironically (and, perhaps, brilliantly), has distracted attention away from the reason for the walkout – the massive and shameless fraud carried out in the October 11 regional elections.

More and more, analysts are being sucked into a discussion of what was behind the walkout – Naryshkin attacking Surkov? Surkov attacking Gryzlov? Medvedev taking on Putin? A nefarious plot to destroy Russia by outside enemies determined to drive the motherland to its knees? – and, as a result, no one is really looking at what happened on October 11. The falsification has been taken for granted and the question has become merely why is there even this tiny flash of apparently staged outrage.

But information about the falsification and how it was carried out is trickling out bit by bit and it is worth paying attention to.

There is so much to be outraged about that it is hard to know where to begin, but I’d like to take a moment to focus on the role of the men in uniform – Russia’s police and Interior Ministry troops.

By all accounts, they played a much more aggressive and active role in perpetrating the fraud and in protecting those who were perpetrating it than has been the case in previous elections. Duma Deputy Oleg Shein, A Just Russia’s losing candidate for mayor in Astrakhan, told RFE/RL that hundreds of police surrounded the city’s election commission during the vote count and would not allow election monitors or even law enforcement officials into the building.

One video making the rounds shows how election monitors in Azov discovered hundreds of marked ballots in a closet at one precinct and how a police officer on the scene refuses to take action and covers up the fraud.

Another video shows a Communist candidate for the Moscow Duma identifying people being allowed to vote with identification from outside the city. When he asks the police officer on duty to act, the officer instead detains him and a journalist on the scene and escorts them away, threatening to arrest them.

This list could go on and on. “The Moscow Times” reported on October 13 that riot police in Derbent “used tear gas and even fired at voters” to prevent them from casting ballots. The daily also reported that 75 Derbent police officers signed an open letter saying they were being pressured to back the incumbent, while a local Federal Security Service officer filed a libel complaint against the main challenger.

It is safe to say that the police are not doing these things for no reason. The police role on October 11 is a clear and frightening indication that the political manipulation of law enforcement is alive and well in Russia. New York University professor Mark Galeotti touched on this in a recent commentary for RFE/RL. He argues that a key reason why police reform in Russia is going nowhere is that “the police are still seen as an essentially political tool.” “Everyone from the Kremlin down to municipal authorities seems to prize loyalty over professionalism,” Galeotti writes.

The police played a key role in handing unrestrained political power to United Russia. And they are going to expect to be repaid, in the form of a free hand to continue their corrupt and criminal practices. In a recent RFE/RL interview, St. Petersburg law professor Yakov Glinsky quoted an FSB officer who told him, “The police racket has replaced the criminal racket. And not on the level of individual members of the force. But on the level of whole departments.”

President Dmitry Medvedev has made a lot of bold public statements about the need to combat corruption and legal nihilism. But, as I have argued before, his own power rests on this corruption and he cannot divert from it without undermining his own tenuous legitimacy. There is some informed speculation that he is using the anticorruption drive to build his own political base, one independent of Vladimir Putin. But the October 11 fiasco demonstrates far more clearly than his liberal proclamations that law enforcement remains a political weapon in Russia. Any anticorruption fight that comes out of the Kremlin is really a witch hunt against political enemies.

It is an ugly bargain. The ruling elite uses the police to destroy their political enemies. In return, the police are turned loose among Russian business and the Russian people like wolves among sheep.

-- Robert Coalson

Tags:police, Russia, elections, corruption

The Revolution Will Be Stage-Managed

Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov (left) and LDPR head Vladimir Zhirinovsky at a press conference in the State Duma on October 14

Posted At: 15 October 16:49

So now we're supposed to believe that Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Gennady Zyuganov are the last great defenders of Russian democracy? They were shocked, appalled, and offended that the Kremlin would --ghasp! -- fix an election and decided to make a stand.

Yeah, right. Clearly something else is going on here.

Following up on Robert Coalson's post earlier today, there are more than a few signs out there that Wednesday's walkout of the State Duma by the so-called loyal opposition -- Zhirinovsky's LDPR, Zyugnov's Communists, and A Just Russia -- was a stage-managed affair that was given a green light at the very highest levels.

For one thing, Zhirinovsky, who initiated the walkout, doesn't do anything of this magnitude without an underlying motive (and that motive is never the advancement of democracy), and without prompting from his masters in the Kremlin.

And as Danila Galperovich of RFE/RL's Russian Service points out in a commentary today, the floor speeches by LDPR deputies that sparked the walkout, ostensibly in protest of alleged falsifications in the October 11 local elections, "were obviously rehearsed note for note."

Moreover, the parliamentary rebellion received extensive -- and largely respectful -- coverage on Russia's main state-run television channels. In the tightly controlled world of Russian television, that doesn't happen by accident.

"Could Gennadi Zyuganov, Sergei Mironov, and Vladimir Zhirinovsky with their followers summon the guts for a grandiose scandal without a condescending nod from their curators?" Mikhail Rostovsky asked rhetorically in a commentary in today's edition of "Moskovsky komsomolets."

So what's really going on?

In his commentary (available in Russian here and in English here), Galperovich spells out two possible scenarios, both of which are tied to power struggles at the highest level of the Russian elite.

The first of these pits Sergei Naryshkin, the Kremlin chief of staff, against his deputy Vladislav Surkov, the regime's unofficial ideologist.

In recent weeks, Russian media has been rife with speculation that President Dmitry Medvedev was about to sack Naryshkin as chief of staff and replace him with Surkov.

Naryshkin is closely affiliated with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the leader of the siloviki faction of security service veterans surrounding Russia's de facto ruler, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Most Kremlin watchers believe he was put in his post to keep an eye on Medvedev, lest he get any crazy ideas about acting like he is actually the president.

According to some press reports, particularly a recent story in "Nezavisimaya gazeta," Medvedev's first choice to replace Naryshkin was Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov, the president's law school classmate. But lacking such latitude, Medvedev reportedly settled on Surkov, a powerful figure and skilful bureaucrat who is also Sechin's bitter rival.

According to this scenario, Naryshkin tasked Zhirinovsky with initiating the Duma revolt. The goal was to discredit, embarrass, and emasculate Surkov, whose portfolio includes keeping Russia's political parties docile and obedient.

A second scenario outlined by Galperovich also features Surkov, but this time not as the target of this elaborate special operation -- but as its instigator.

According to this version, it was Surkov who "activated" Zhirinovsky with the goal of discrediting and weakening Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov, head of the ruling United Russia faction and another close Sechin ally.

The Duma walkout was aimed at United Russia, which won a suspiciously large majority in local elections on October 11, and at Gryzlov in particular.

Surkov, the mastermind of Russia's authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy," has been engaged in a low-intensity bureaucratic war with Gryzlov for months over plans to revamp the country's party system.

In place of the current system of de facto one party rule by United Russia, Surkov has been seeking to create a pseudo multiparty system with several parties -- all beholden to the Kremlin -- "competed" for voters' allegiance.

United Russia would be the first among equals under the new plan, but it would share real power with other factions.

The lopsided victory United Russia scored in local elections was widely seen as an effort by Sechin and Gryzlov to crush Surkov's plan and maintain one-party dominance. And the LDPR inspired walkout, according to this scenario, was Surkov's counterpunch.

Both of these scenarios ultimately pit Surkov against Sechin. Both are also related to an ongoing struggle in the elite about Russia's future direction, with Sechin seeking to maintain the status quo, while Surkov (and Medvedev) appear to be seeking slight modifications.

According to the latest reports, Zhirinovsky (and A Just Russia) have agreed to end their boycott of the Duma, while the Communists are still holding out. The fallout in the coming days and weeks should provide more clues about which of these scenarios -- or another we haven't yet discerned -- is closer to reality.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:parties, gryzlov, surkov, sechin, walkout, naryshkin, duma, Vladimir Putin, medvedev, Russia

Analysts Scratch Their Heads

Analyst Dmitry Oreshkin says Medvedev has to make changes if he wants a second term.

Posted At: 15 October 14:21

The events in the Duma yesterday and today have naturally given birth to considerable speculation. Nothing in Russia, of course, is what it appears to be. It couldn’t be that elections were massively falsified and people are justifiably outraged about it. That would be too simple.

Grani.ru made the rounds of some leading analysts and here are excerpts from their comments:

Political commentator Kirill Rogov said the October 11 polls were a “traditional ‘vote gathering’ characteristic of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian regimes.”

Undoubtedly this demarche is not so much connected with the problem of democracy in the country as it is with definite splits within the political elite and among those who stand at the top of the political pyramid. The initiator was Zhirinovsky, who fairly consistently tailors his actions to the current circumstances. I think this is a serious demarche against United Russia and that group within the political leadership that relies on it. It seems intended to increase Medvedev’s influence, including his influence in parliament since those factions that walked out have appealed to him and intend to meet with him.

It is an interesting twist in the intra-clan struggle that demonstrates that the monolith of the power vertical against the background of the worsening economic situation has been shaken and that conflicts within it are inevitable.

He adds that the walkout was an intrigue “aimed at, in part, Surkov and the leadership of the Central Election Commission.”

INDEM foundation head Georgy Satarov doubts the situation “will produce any effect, since our senior leadership does not like to create dangerous precedents, as it has shown repeatedly.”

Since the federal authorities are fairly monolithic, it can’t be excluded that some factions will appear that will decide to use the situation for an attack on Luzhkov. This is a completely possible scenario. Even if this is the reaction, it will nonetheless be useful. It will create a precedent. The important thing here isn’t motive, but real actions. How will Medvedev act? He will most likely run off to consult with his patron and then will do what his patron tells him to do.

As always, commentator Dmitry Oreshkin was blunt:

Of course, this “kow-towing revolt” will be pacified and put down and everyone will return to the Mother Church. But it means a lot. Churov shrugs and says: “That’s politics.” Maybe Churov doesn’t know that elections are politics. He is used to the idea that politics are bad and he simply transcribes figures and everyone cringes and is grateful to him. He carries out the political task that was given to him when he was appointed: Putin is always right.

It makes sense that the rebels are appealing to the president to guarantee theconstitution, although they know perfectly well that Churov is Putin’s man, not Medvedev’s. Politics are at heart very primitive, clan interests. In this case, the losing clans – the LDPR, A Just Russia, the Communists, and, of course, all the democrats – they are all interested in having an honest, working system for counting votes. And here they are united with the president. If he wants to run for a second term, he cannot allow Putin’s team to count the votes.

Finally, journalist and political commentator Yevgeny Kiselyov notes that the three revolting factions are thoroughly in bed with the Kremlin, but adds that “in the history of Russia there have been situations when revolts were led by political forces that had previously been absolutely loyal to the ruling regime and had played strictly according to the rules.”

I don’t mean to say that this demarche will lead to any titanic changed in the political system of the country. It is more likely that it won’t than that it will. But there is the concept of “materials fatigue.” You can bend something over and over again but at some indefinable moment, it suddenly breaks. I think this is the case with our Russian political life. You can go against elementary common sense, against all civilized concepts of democracy five times, 10 times, 100,000 times, but on the 100,001st time, even the most loyal ones lose their patience.

I think it is obvious that this vertical – which has been under construction for 10 years – sooner or later will break. There are some constructs that simply cannot stand the test of time. I don’t mean to say that these events are the bomb that will do it, but it is not possible to keep building higher and higher, more and more vertical, forever. It will shake and it will break. Horizontal constructions are a lot more stable and long-lasting.

-- Robert Coalson

The Tipping Point

The loyal opposition walks out of the Duma on October 14.

Posted At: 14 October 15:45

The only surprising thing about the recent regional elections in Russia was the extent of the manipulation and falsification. Everyone knew United Russia would win enough to control everything, but no one expected they would leave so few crumbs even for the loyal “opposition,” including A Just Russia, the Communist Party, and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia.

The theft was so egregious that those three factions walked out of the State Duma today and vowed not to return until they are granted a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev (of course, this isn’t a problem for the Duma, which can continue working just fine because United Russia’s faction is so massive). They still hope that the “Good Tsar” will make everything right, although Medvedev has already stated that the vote gave United Russia the “moral and legal right” to govern.

Political analyst Dmitry Oreshkin’s take on the recent events was published on grani.ru and deserves citation at length:

I have always thought it was important to understand where the line of permissibility lies – how far can one go and how far is too far? Say, you can falsify elections by 20 percent, but not by 80 percent. In Chechnya, you can falsify 100percent, while in Moscow they tried to shift 25 percent and it produced this scandal. It is obvious that the Duma is completely controlled, that everyone in there got there by a Kremlin decision. It is clear that they are ready to wash the authorities’ feet and drink the water. But suddenly, at some tipping point, the drink gets a little too thick, and they begin to get nauseated. The most interesting thing is to catch that moment.

It would seem the authorities thought they could do what they wanted without limit. But in order to do things “without limit,” you have to resort to shooting. Every person has some minimum of self-respect and if there is not the direct threat of death or imprisonment, he will refuse to be taken for an idiot. In this situation, the authorities demanded that they be complete idiots because it is obvious to everyone that the elections were falsified. You don’t even need to prove it – it is obvious to anyone whose eyes are open. And so the day of anger has arrived, the moment of refusal. It had to come because if we develop this model further, the next step is to start building labor camps. Since deputies don’t face that threat, they still have some sense of dignity. This is good. This is a sign the mechanism has stopped, that we still have some living people.

If Medvedev intends to run for a second term, he must either remove [Central Election Commission head Vladimir] Churov, as Putin’s man, and put in his own man, or he must restore honest elections with some risk that he might lose. In any case, he must do something with the election commissions.

I think we are gradually approaching a political crisis and that there is nothing good in this. It could end up with shooting. The mechanism called elections is a political conflict that is regulated by law. Yes, there might be violations, some sort of falsifications, and if they don’t go past certain limits, the elite groups are willing to swallow them. But if they go beyond some limit, it becomes clear that the mechanism isn’t working and intra-elite competition moves outside the scope of regulation by law. And questions are decided either by summoning dangerous people in the middle of the night and shooting them, as happened under Stalin, or by returning and expanding the institute of honest elections. The problem comes when those who are afraid to lose power attempt to maintain it by violence. If that does not happen, then gradually under public pressure it will become necessary to put a respectable person (or respectable people) on the Central Election Commission and begin everything over again. That is democracy. And it doesn’t appear because we really want it to, but because powerful elite groups have no other way of peacefully reaching compromises.

Another interesting point is that the outrage is limited to the political elites. Average Russians seem, once again, to be indifferent to what has happened. Russia does not seem even close to experiencing anything like what we saw in Iran during the summer.

This offers Medvedev a golden opportunity to turn this potential crisis into a grand coup for himself, precisely by taking on the Good Tsar role that the outraged loyal oppositionists in the Duma are offering him. Churov is a political hack who is easily replaced. Even the return of his predecessor, Aleksandr Veshnyakov -- who engineered United Russia’s rise to power nationally and oversaw the managed 2004 reelection of Vladimir Putin, but who was not viewed as strong-handed enough to ensure the post-Putin transition – would be seen as a “victory for democracy” under the current circumstances.

Most likely, the lackeys in the Duma “opposition” that Oreshkin depicts so vividly would be satisfied with that gesture alone. They would be willing to “move forward” and would sweep last weekend’s travesty under the rug.

But Medvedev shouldn’t let them be so docile! He could easily go further and cast the blame – rightly – on the regional leaders who turned the elections into a farce. It has long been rumored that the Kremlin wants to get rid of Moscow Mayor Yury Luzhkov – now it has a “democratic” reason for doing so. People wouldn’t even notice that he replaced Luzhkov with some other pliable figure or that he gave Luzhkov some other government post (ambassador to South Ossetia?). And they’d certainly wouldn’t get around to insisting on restoring gubernatorial elections or making the systemic reforms that Oreshkin calls for.

In a recent interview with RFE/RL’s Russian Service, former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov said the real task of the genuine opposition in Russia is “to shape public opinion about what is happening.” He says that change will come only when the Kremlin sees that a tipping point has been reached for a wider range of the population than just the elites that Oreshkin talks about. If this happens, he says, “the authorities will see that society is changing and it will understand that people might come out into the streets if expectations are formed that there will be normal elections in 2011 or 2012 and if those expectations are dashed.”

Only this kind of pressure can push the authorities – even the “liberal” Medvedev – to embark on real democratization. But it seems like a quixotic hope. RFE/RL’s Russian Service recently produced a video report about the return of a praising reference to Stalin to an inscription in the Kurskaya metro station in Moscow. At the two minute mark of the video, one typical Muscovite sums up the tide that Kasyanov and others are swimming against.

“Why not,” a middle-aged woman in an orange shirt says. “If they think it is necessary, why not? I’m for it.”

-- Robert Coalson

Tags:medvedev, Russia, elections

Naive Khodorkovsky?

Pavel Khodorkovsky on Times Square last week.

Posted At: 01 October 12:33

Last week RFE/RL correspondent Nikola Krastev caught up with Pavel Khodorkovsky, the 24-year-old son of jailed former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Pavel Khodorkovsky has been living in the United States since September 2003 and, on the advice of his father, has not returned to Russia since then. He was holding a picket in front of a U.S.-Russian business forum, trying to draw attention to his father’s case.

Krastev asked Khodorkovsky about a recently published exchange of letters between his father and novelist Lyudmila Ulitskaya in which Mikhail Khodorkovsky says that he had been “backed into a corner from which there was no other honorable escape.” Pavel Khodorkovsky said he thinks his father actually believed he might get justice in Vladimir Putin’s Russia back then.

“I think that at the time my father was rather idealistic. He was innocent and he was confident he would be able to prove his innocence in court,” Pavel Khodorkovsky said. “But because neither the first nor the second trial was independent, he did not succeed. In retrospect, six years later, one can say that, yes, what he thought then was naïve. But at that time, he didn’t think so because there was a new president. There was a new wave of enthusiasm. People thought that these were changes for the better.”

Perhaps that’s what Mikhail Khodorkovsky meant when he told Ulitskaya that “a wise person most likely would have avoided such a fate.”

-- Robert Coalson

What The Kremlin Thinks

Posted At: 25 September 15:09

Power Vertical fans out there who are looking for weekend reading could do worse than to print out “What Russia Thinks,” a new collection of essays put out by the European Council on Foreign Relations.

The volume’s editors say they “hope it is a good guide to ‘what the Kremlin thinks’ on three key sets of issues: the Russian political system and the role played in it by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev; the economic crisis and how it affects Russia’s plans for modernization; and Russia’s role in the world in the light of President Medvedev’s call for a new European Security Treaty.”

The contributors are an impressive bunch of well-connected analysts, including Olga Kryshtanovskaya, Fyodor Lukyanov, and Gleb Pavlovsky. I’m particularly looking forward to tucking into “An Ideological Self-Portrait of the Russian Regime” by Leonid Polyakov, a professor at Moscow University’s Higher School of Economics and a leading interpreter of the ideas of Kremlin ideologue Vladislav Surkov.

Luckily, we have a three-day weekend here in Prague.

-- Robert Coalson

Not So Fast

Russian "national leader" Vladimir Putin met with Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in October 2007.

Posted At: 24 September 14:41

The reports of U.S. President Barack Obama’s private talks in New York yesterday with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev have generally optimistically highlighted the two leaders’ apparently growing agreement on the need to step up pressure on Iran over its nuclear program. Speaking to reporters after the talks, Medvedev repeated a statement he’d made earlier in Moscow that “sanctions are seldom productive, but they are sometimes inevitable.”

I have long been skeptical of the Kremlin’s interest in cooperating with the United States on Iran and should confess that I remain so. Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote an analysis arguing that Moscow’s interest in weakening the United States and destroying the so-called unipolar world order trumped its interest in resolving the Iran dispute. The Kremlin views Iran’s nuclear program as the West’s problem:

Clearly, it is not in Moscow's interest to have a nuclear-armed Iran on its southern border with the capability of striking targets within Russia. However, this danger is remote -- it is hard to imagine a scenario in which Iran would risk total annihilation by destroying, say, Russia's Black Sea Fleet or leveling Volgograd with a nuclear strike. And that remote danger is made even more unlikely by repeated U.S. and Israeli declarations that a nuclear-armed Iran is "unacceptable." The refusal of the United States to pull the military option off the table means the worst-case scenario for Moscow, in the event talks fail, is not a mushroom cloud over Kuban but seeing Washington become bogged down in yet another military involvement with the inevitable further sapping of its strength and prestige. The facts that oil prices would also likely skyrocket under such a scenario and that Moscow would emerge as a "reliable energy partner" are probably also not causing Kremlin strategists to lose any sleep.

I still find this analysis compelling. So I was pleased to find the same arguments put forward in an interview with former KGB turned Putin critic Konstantin Preobrazhensky on the website frontpagemag.com.

Preobrazhenksy is an old acquaintance who wrote occasional commentaries for “The Moscow Times” when I was the opinion-section editor there back in the 1990s and early 2000s. A lot of what he wrote then seems quite prophetic now. For instance, in December 2000, he wrote: “Russia is once again on the path toward establishing a totalitarian state. Instead of communism, a sort of nationalism is fast becoming the ideology of this new structure, which is waging open warfare against civil society.”

In a July 1998 piece called “A New Era For The FSB,” he rightly noted that the appointment of the little-known Leningrader Vladimir Putin to head the resurgent security agency was a watershed event, although he was uncertain then whether Putin would be able to overcome the resistance of the Moscow-based elites entrenched within the organization.

In his September 2 frontpagemag.com interview, Preobrazhensky throws cold water on the idea that Moscow will come to the United States’s aid on Iran:

Americans still cannot get rid of the illusion that Russians are thinking like them. For Americans, it goes without saying that Iran is a dangerous country which can hurt them with its nuclear weapons. But for Russians it is not so at all. They are fine with the current situation. Weakening America is a strategic goal of the current Russian regime.

Asked directly whether Moscow is afraid of Iran’s missiles, Preobrazhensky was direct: “No, it’s not.”

He goes on to offer informed speculation about the extent of covert cooperation between Tehran and Moscow. He concludes that “the intelligence services of Russia and Iran are cooperating. Not only on Afghanistan, but on America too. And on Armenia and Azerbaijan and also on the interior situation in Russia.” By the latter, he has in mind Russia’s Islamic minority.

I concluded my analysis of Moscow’s Iran policy last year with this argument:

While combating terrorism and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction are broad goals to which virtually every international actor can subscribe, they encompass myriad specific cases and issues, any one of which may be sacrificed to broader strategic interests. Moscow has declared the erosion and eventual replacement of what it defines as the unipolar global structure as a key security priority. Moscow's Iran policy is a clear example of a situation where, for the Kremlin, getting the right result -- an end to Tehran's nuclear-weapons ambitions -- is not as important as getting there by a process that promotes its broader agenda.

But Preobrazhensky’s formulation is a lot clearer: “Weakening America is a strategic goal of the current Russian regime.”

-- Robert Coalson

Tags:united, states, nonproliferation, Iran, Russia

The Missiles Of September

SM-3 missile launched from the destroyer USS Decatur in June 2007.

Posted At: 21 September 16:28

Is Moscow already having second thoughts about vocally embracing the U.S. Barack Obama's changes in Washington's missile defense plans?

Apparently so. The head of Russia's General Staff, General Nikolai Makarov, said on Monday that Russia has a problem with potential U.S. plans to place a radar system in the Caucasus. Makarov also said that Moscow has not backed off on its plans to deploy Iskander missiles in Kaliningrad, despite announcements over the weekend that it had.

It is still unclear whether Makarov's remarks indicate a change in the Kremlin's approach to Obama's missile defense plans. But it does raise questions about the extent to which the timing and circumstances of Obama's announcement on missile defense last week influenced Russia's initially positive reaction to the news.

According to my sources, Obama signed off on the Pentagon's proposed changes on Wednesday September 16 and planned to announce them on Friday September 18. This schedule would give the White House time to dispatch U.S. delegations to Prague and Warsaw to inform the Czech and Polish authorities that the administration was altering its missile defense policy.

But as is often the case in Washington, word of the decision leaked overnight on Wednesday, forcing the White House to move its roll out of the new policy forward by a day.

The symbolism of making the announcement on September 17, the 70th anniversary of the 1939 Soviet invasion of Poland, was unfortunate. And in the interim between the leaks and Obama's official announcement, the White House briefly lost control of the story as it made its way through the European news cycle.

By the time of Obama's announcement Thursday morning in Washington -- which was already Thursday evening in Europe -- perceptions had already set in that Obama had abandoned missile defense.

As Gregory Feifer notes in his post yesterday, this led to triumphalism and crowing in Moscow about how the Kremlin forced Washington to back down on its plans. It also caused deep concern in Eastern Europe that the Obama was abandoning the Czechs and Poles in the face of an increasingly assertive Russia.

I spoke to James Goldgeier, a senior fellow the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of the book "America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11," shortly after Obama spoke on Thursday:

It is unfortunate that the president, secretary of defense, and [Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] General [James] Cartwright didn't speak [on Wednesday] because they were very clear in presenting the decision that the administration has made -- which is to construct a missile defense against Iran. But unfortunately for the administration -- because the decision was to do something different than the deployment in Poland and the Czech Republic -- the story that was out this morning on CNN and wires was 'Obama Scraps Missile Defense' or 'Obama Shelves Missile Defense Shield.' And that was incorrect.

It was indeed incorrect. But it was also this incorrect interpretation everybody -- including the Russians -- reacted to. And it will be very difficult for Moscow to walk back their lavish praise of Obama's decision now without looking rather silly.

It is hard -- if not impossible -- to view what Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and General Cartwright announced on Thursday as a climb down.

The previous plan, to place an advanced radar in the Czech Republic and 10 interceptor missiles in Poland, was designed to counter a long-range Iranian missile threat that the Pentagon has concluded will not materialize nearly as quickly as they had previously feared.

Instead, the threat from Iran today stems from their development and acquisition of short and intermediate-range missiles that can already strike Europe.

In the short term, the administration plans to deploy dozens of SM-3 interceptors using the sea-based Aegis system as soon as 2011.

The system will be upgraded in 2015 and will include interceptors based on sea and land -- possibly even in Poland and the Czech Republic. A more advanced system would be built in 2018 and 2020, with the capability to intercept long-range Iranian missiles, should that need arise.

In place of the sophisticated radar the Bush administration planned for the Czech Republic, White House officials say they would use a more modest version that would be located in Turkey or the Caucasus.

Goldgeier described the administration's decision as based on "the threat we see" and "the best technology we can deploy against that threat."

Do General Makarov's tough comments today mean that Russia is about to take a harder line on the new U.S. plan? We should probably have a better idea when Obama meets Russian President Dmitry Medvedev in New York later this week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:united, states, missile, defense, Vladimir Putin, medvedev, obama, Russia

Spinning Missile Defense In Moscow

The test-firing of Iran's medium-range surface-to-surface Sejil-2 missile

Posted At: 20 September 16:09

MOSCOW -- The message from Moscow was anything but unpredictable: It was the Kremlin's staunch opposition to American plans for a missile defense shield that forced the Obama Administration to drop them.

"We appreciate the responsible attitude," President Dmitry Medvedev said, "toward implementing our agreements." He’ll be standing several inches taller next to President Barack Obama when the two meet on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York next week. But the self-delusion in Moscow this weekend is as heavy as the self-satisfaction profuse.

Russia’s perception that scrapping the Bush Administration's missile shield is a sign of American weakness was one of the decision’s chief dangers. More important was its signal to the Czech Republic and Poland, where the shield’s components were set to be installed.

For Warsaw and Prague, going along with Washington's plan was less about its merits than indicating -- in the aftermath of September 11 -- that they were serious allies prepared to risk Moscow's wrath. The American radar installation and ten interceptor missiles would provide a physical manifestation of the two former Soviet Bloc’s new Atlantic ties at a time when Russia's invasion of Georgia has cast doubt on Washington's commitment to standing up for Western values and protecting its weakest allies.

The Czechs were also worried an announcement would affect upcoming elections, so the real debate in Washington over mothballing the missile shield plans was surely about timing and rhetoric. The insistence that the new system would be more advanced and effective is partly a cover for dropping the old one. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

The previous administration's missile defense program represented a symbolic resurrection of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program. It was also about telling the world Washington was going to do whatever it wanted. Missile defense made being with us or against an even greater ideological commitment that shook the NATO alliance and gave critics such as Russia more real grist for the mill.

The missile shield plans also called for spending tens of billions of dollars on technology that was never proven to work, a waste even less reasonable during a financial crisis.

If dropping the missile shield plans was all about common sense, one of the dividends is the hope that the decision really will help improve relations with Moscow. Being taken seriously is one of the Kremlin's main considerations, and it’s making as much as it can of telling Washington I told you so.

But the Kremlin’s arguments against American missile defense were never really about common sense or security. Moscow knew ten interceptor missiles in Poland never posed Russia a threat. Still, the Kremlin had vowed to aim nuclear missiles at Europe, although they walked that threat back in the wake of Obama's announcement. Russia’s leaders perceive instability around the world as a plus for Moscow, and they’re almost certain to latch on to something else.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, the man who really rules Russia, indicated as much on Friday when he said dropping the missile shield plans "inspires hope," but groused, “I do anticipate that this correct and brave decision will be followed by others."

Defending the Bush Administration’s missile defense plans reminds me of a story I heard about a Russian doctor telling a cancer patient it was better to keep smoking because quitting would be a shock to his system. The decision to shelve Bush's plans is the latest proof that reason again reigns in Washington. It will be needed to deal with whatever Moscow throws at the West next.

-- Gregory Feifer

Tags:united, states, missile, defense, Vladimir Putin, medvedev, obama, Russia

The Games Of Autumn

President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin play badminton at the presidential residence in Sochi

Posted At: 14 September 17:55

For weeks President Dmitry Medvedev appeared to be ascendant and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin seemed invisible.

Medvedev was moving fast against the state corporations, a signature feature of Putin's authoritarian modernization that tower over Russia's top-heavy economy. He seemed to be getting a handle on personnel policy by building a team of "civiliki," experts in civil law, to counter the influence of Putin's "siloviki." He railed against Russia's "primitive raw-materials economy" and "endemic corruption." And he slammed the security services for ineffectively dealing with terrorism.

And then suddenly, as my colleague and newly minted Power Verticalist Gregory Feifer points out in an earlier post, Putin grabbed the initiative back with one answer to one question at a meeting with Western journalists and Russia experts last week.

Asked whether he would consider running for president in 2012, Putin said he and Medvedev would "think together and consider the realities of our time, our personal plans, the political landscape… and we'll come to a decision."

Here's how Ivan Rodin described Putin's move in an article in Monday's edition of "Nezavisimaya gazeta":

As things stand, Putin handily won all the lost positions in one bold stroke late last week. The premier pronounced the tandem still existing and himself still playing the first violin in it. He said that he was making all important decisions - including who
would be the next president of Russia, for that matter.

Russia's fall political season is kicking into gear after the summer lull -- and what is really going on remains as opaque as ever. Were Putin's remarks a warning shot? Were they an attempt to clip the increasingly assertive Medvedev's wings? Or was the whole thing just a diversionary show, a fake conflict in which the president and premier are acting out carefully orchestrated roles for public consumption?

If the conflict is real, then how hard is Medvedev prepared to push for real power? How hard is Putin prepared to push back?

And if it is all a diversion, then what is the end game?

I have always maintained that whatever relationship and secret arrangements might exist between Putin and Medvedev, the conflict between their respective teams is very real -- and has been intensifying over the past year.

Along these lines, political analyst Aleksei Makarkin told "Vedomosti" that he did not expect an open clash to break out between Medvedev and Putin. But the two leaders' teams, he added, would continue to jockey for power.

Putin and Medvedev imply in their latest statements that both might run for president in 2012. The outcome [of the power struggle] will depend on the economic and political situation in 2011.

Let the games begin.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:Vladimir Putin, medvedev, Russia

Putin Hints at Return

Prime Minister Vladimr Putin at the Valdai discussion club in Novo-Ogaroyovo

Posted At: 14 September 15:40

Vladimir Putin's indication that he may seek to regain the presidency in 2012 has opened the pre-election political season in Russia -- at least that's what some are saying. But while the prime minister's announcement may have opened the season for speculation about the election, the decision surely rests with Putin.

The admission came Friday during an annual meeting with Western journalists and Russia experts called the Valdai discussion group. Asked whether he would run in 2012, Putin said, "We'll think together and consider the realities of our time, our personal plans, the political landscape… and we'll come to a decision," news agencies reported.

Putin served eight years as president before his two-term limit expired last year, when his handpicked successor Medvedev took over. Since then, Russia has amended its constitution to increase the presidential term to six years, prompting many to believe the Kremlin was preparing the way for Putin to return to a dozen more years in office.

Medvedev's chief public role has been to make pronouncements that sound presidential: excoriations about labor productivity or alcoholism, grand pronouncements about Russia's future as a land where rule of law and technological advances are the world's envy, and liberal-sounding promises to root out corruption.

Today the president led an international conference in the city of Yaroslavl, where he repeated his call for a major new security agreement to supersede NATO and the OSCE. On Thursday, Medvedev published an open letter criticizing Russian corruption, economic backwardness and alcoholism, vowing to transform the country into a technological leader and an open and democratic society.

At the same time, Putin has been at pains to show himself the more active and decisive of the country's two leaders. When asked last Friday who was running the country, Putin said it was Medvedev -- but in a manner of someone who's really in charge.

"We have nothing to prove to anyone," Putin said. "If someone is living in a dream, he needs to wake up, take a shower and look at reality. If you want to cooperate with Russia you need to know that it's the president who heads Russia."

But the events of the past several days indicate otherwise. They echo the dynamic of last January's natural gas standoff with Ukraine: Putin was busy negotiating a deal with his Ukrainian counterpart Yulia Tymoshenko while Medvedev was off hosting a conference on energy security ignored by almost everyone.

If Medvedev often appears stiff and professorial despite his dandyishly fitted suits and broad ties, Putin's image has been crafted to appeal to Russians' emotions. He's shown bare-chested on horseback, criticizing the West at international events Medvedev would be expected to attend, and making the kind of practical decisions that affect how the country is really run -- such as whether he'll return to the presidency in two and a half years. That pronouncement has further undermined Medvedev's authority only halfway into his term.

--Gregory Feifer

Tags:Vladimir Putin, medvedev, Russia

'Permanent Revolution'

Is Medvedev aiming to be Russia's next great reformer?

Posted At: 10 September 10:38

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has roundly criticized his country for what he calls a humiliating dependence on natural resources, a "half-Soviet" social sphere, and instability in the Caucasus.

The criticism, published on the gazeta.ru website, appears in an open letter on the country's strategic challenges, addressed to the Russian people under the headline "Forward Russia!"

"Should we continue to drag into the future our primitive raw-materials economy," Medvedev writes, "endemic corruption, and inveterate habit of relying on the state, foreign countries or some all-powerful doctrine to solve our problems -- on anyone except ourselves?"

Looking back for precedents, Medvedev lauds the reforms of Peter the Great and the Soviet Union, but criticizes them for "destroying millions of lives."

"Today, for the first time in our history," he writes, "we have the chance to prove to ourselves and the world that Russia can develop democratically."

Medvedev says the government has developed a plan to advance the economy by making Russia a leader in technology, energy efficiency, and space infrastructure. For it to succeed, Medvedev writes, "Russia's political system will also be extremely open, flexible, and intrinsically complex."

Calling for a "permanent revolution," Medvedev vows Russia will become an "active and respected member of the world community of free nations." He calls on Russians to e-mail the Kremlin with suggestions.

Medvedev's letter, posted on a leading independent news website, is the latest in a series of exercises burnishing his image as a liberalizing reformer. But although exhaustive on vague, overarching goals, Medvedev fails to offer a single concrete policy change that would bring about the drastic reform he seeks.

Critics will note that Medvedev -- former President Vladimir Putin's handpicked successor, who came to power last year after Putin's eight years in office -- never hints at criticism of his mentor. Putin revived authoritarianism in Russia by cracking down on democratic institutions and the free press, and most Russians believe he retains power in his current role as prime minister.

Since Putin's ascent 10 years ago, corruption has ballooned, society has become far more closed, and the government has done virtually nothing to alleviate a deepening dependence on the oil and gas industry that fuelled Russia's decade-long economic boom.

Some will surely take Medvedev's liberal-sounding rhetoric to indicate a growing split between him and Putin. But his letter echoes many previous calls for reform by him and Putin, and others will see it as another installment of the kind of public relations exercise Russia's leaders rely on to stay in power.

-- Gregory Feifer

Tags:reform, medvedev, Russia, corruption

Whither Russia Inc.?

Dmitry Medvedev speaks during a meeting on preparations for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics

Posted At: 26 August 18:13

It appears there is more trouble on the horizon for Russia's mammoth state corporations.

The daily "Vedomosti" reports that Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is proposing that oversight of construction work for the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi be taken out of the hands of the state corporation Olimpstroi (you can read an English-language version of the story, courtesy of The Moscow Times, here).

The report came shortly after the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor-General's Office announced that it was setting up a special unit to look into possible corruption associated with construction projects for the Sochi Olympics.

And it came just weeks after Russian President Dmitry Medvedev instructed Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika to open an investigation into Russia's state corporations to determine how effectively they work, how efficiently they use their assets, and the degree to which they are complying with the law.

As I wrote here, the first target of the probe appeared to be Russian Technologies, which is run by close Putin ally Sergei Chemezov.

So are the state corporations, a key cornerstone of the authoritarian modernization at the heart of "Putinism," really on the way out?

The state corporations -- Russian Technologies, the bank VEB, the nanotechnology firm Rosnano, the nuclear agency Rosatom, the Olympic construction firm Olympstroi, the Housing Maintenance Fund, and the Deposit Insurance Agency -- were given access to massive funds, were allowed to operate with little oversight, and were exempt from disclosure requirements.

As Kirill Rogov of the Institute of Economy In Transition wrote recently in Russky Newsweek, this suited the needs of Russia's ruling elite just fine during the flush years of Putin's presidency:

By and large, the state corporation is an ideal economic form for a bureaucratic and oligarchic state. It lays the legal foundations of bureaucratic absolutism and breathes new life into Louis XIV's famous formula 'The state is me.' It also brings the principle of a ' controllable market' to life: authorized bureaucrats (the new oligarchs) can manage state property almost like private property, whereas private owners (the old oligarchs) must coordinate their actions with the state.

Today, of course, money is getting tighter and the state corporations have proven themselves to be anything but frugal and efficient. Rogov says this is causing a fundamental rethink of the whole ideology behind what just a couple years ago was known as "Russia Inc.":

There is no doubt that the Russian authorities will have to revise decisions taken in the last years of Putin's presidency. At first, these steps will be half-hearted and clumsy and aimed at saving of at least a part of assets and positions in the economy that were taken by bureaucratic oligarchy. It will later be clear that the ideology of state corporations itself is in deep crisis and the only way out is searching for a new economic ideology.

In an article in Russian Profile, Graham Stack writes that August offensive against the state corporations was preceded by a deluge of criticism directed against them earlier in the summer -- from Supreme Arbitration Court Chairman Anton Ivanov, from the Presidential Council on Legal Codification, and from the Audit Chamber and Anti-Monopoly Service:

Medvedev’s move comes just after a number of different bodies raised a chorus of criticism of state corporations in June and July. This points to a carefully orchestrated campaign to discredit state corporations and to the fact that the president has enough political backing across state bureaucracies to get his way.

Underlying this campaign, Stack writes, is a struggle in the halls of power between the "siloviki" clan of security service veterans who rose to prominence under Putin and "Medvedev’s liberal network of the St. Petersburg civil law scholars, nicknamed the 'civiliki.'"

The siloviki, most notably Chemezov and Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, want to preserve the state corporations and statist the economic model that supports them. The civiliki want them brought to heel.

And the key battleground, Stack writes, will be over the fate of Russian Technologies:

The big stumbling block will be what to do with the mother of all state corporations – Russian Technologies (RT) – the very first state corporation established in December of 2007. RT was originally based on defense sector exporters and their suppliers, but rapidly snowballed to include companies ranging from metallurgy to carmakers. The corporation is headed by the influential friend of Putin’s Sergei Chemezov. He is the man who single-handedly tailored the state corporation legislation to suit his personal goals, and is not likely to surrender his huge privileges without a major struggle.

But if the "Vedomosti" report about Olimpstroi is correct, it suggests that Putin is at least somewhat on board for Medvedev's campaign.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:corporations, technologies, chemezov, olimpstroi, state, Vladimir Putin, russian, medvedev, Russia, sergey

Church And State

Patriarch Kirill and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko

Posted At: 21 August 17:57

Russia and Georgia have no diplomatic relations. There are no commercial flights between Moscow and Tbilisi. And the Kremlin has made no secret of the fact that it wants to remove Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili from power.

But nevertheless, one of Russia's top public figures plans to visit Georgia soon and will no doubt be greeted with all the pomp and circumstance of a head of state. That public official is Patriarch Kirill. No date has been announced for the visit yet, although the Moscow Patriarchate says it will happen "by the end of this year."

Visiting Georgia so soon after his high-profile trip to Ukraine earlier this month is anything but subtle. Both countries are governed by pro-Western leaders who are desperately trying to navigate their way out of Moscow's orbit, and both have large, devout, Orthodox Christian populations.

Writing in "The Moscow Times" this week, Fyodor Lukyanov, editor in chief of the journal "Russia In Global Affairs," argues that with his visit to Ukraine, Kirill has emerged as an important new weapon in the Kremlin's foreign-policy arsenal:

The visit by the head of the Russian Orthodox Church showed that there's a new public figure in Russia whose political weight and diplomatic skills surpass those of the secular authorities. He combines tact and kind civility with a firmness of his ideological positions, and his address to worshippers calling for unity and reconciliation is a demonstration of the 'soft,' non-state power that Moscow has long been criticized for lacking.

Shortly after Kirill returned from his visit, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev wrote a blisteringly critical letter to his Ukrainian counterpart Viktor Yushchenko informing him that Moscow would hold off on sending an ambassador to Kyiv.

The next day, Lukyanov notes, Kirill sent his own letter to Yushchenko -- thanking him for his hospitality during the visit:

Not only did Kirill thank the Ukrainian leader for his attention and help in organizing the visit, he also noted that 'despite all of the difficulties, Ukraine is successfully consolidating its statehood.' His letter to the president concludes: 'May God’s blessing be with the people of beautiful Ukraine, with its leaders and military, and with all of us.'

The patriarch's visit to Ukraine was hardly free of controversy. Thousands protested, arguing that he was using an ostensibly spiritual visit as cover for a political mission to further the Kremlin's political agenda.

Kirill did little to allay these fears when, in a speech on Ukrainian television on July 28, he argued that Russians and Ukrainians were one people. He also implored Ukrainians not to sacrifice their common values with Russia in the pursuit of closer ties with Europe, a clear reference to Kyiv's efforts to join NATO and the European Union.

Nevertheless, I think Lukyanov is right about Moscow's strategy, which is more sophisticated than a simple game of good cop-bad cop:

The patriarch addresses his congregation, which by its very definition should not be divided by citizenship or state loyalties. Medvedev appeals directly to the Ukrainian people, letting them know in no uncertain terms that the dialog with their political elite has become unproductive. In fact, the symbolic meaning of not sending a new Russian ambassador to Kiev also ties into this desire to reduce official dialog to a purely technical level.

And there are strong hints that a similar gambit is on the horizon with Georgia.

Back in July, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin met a Georgian Orthodox Church delegation in Moscow. Here's the Russian Foreign Ministry's statement on that meeting:

"In the current, uneasy situation existing in relations between the two countries, cultural-humanitarian ties between the churches of Russia and Georgia continue to be an important channel for maintaining tradition of friendship and mutual understanding between our people."

The delegation also met with Kirill, who called their visit "a new positive step towards brotherly relations of our churches and improvement of relations between our countries."

The phrase "brotherly relations," of course, has historically meant very different things for Tbilisi than it has for Moscow.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:Ukraine, patriarch, kirill, Georgia, medvedev, Russia

Transition Team

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev in Sochi

Posted At: 17 August 18:08

Gleb Pavlovsky chooses his words very carefully. He doesn't make accidental statements to the media. He doesn't commit gaffes. Everything he says in public is calculated to serve the political needs of the moment.

Which is why this comment, at the tail end of an interview Pavlovsky gave to "Russky zhurnal" (which, by the way, he owns) and published online at Kreml.org, caught my attention -- big time:

[Prime Minister Vladimir] Putin's leadership has already ceased to function and its standing has changed. Putin is now an extremely popular person and people trust him. But what has gone before has come to an end for him. He is actively seeking a new political role and image, but has not yet found them. I think that a new political Putin is possible but, of course, not at the expense of weakening the president. This is a fundamental point. As a strong man and successful leader Putin must give President [Dmitry] Medvedev the opportunity to be a strong and, who knows, maybe great president.

This does not of course mean that Putin should depart into the shadows and not show his face. I see a future parting of the ways here. Medvedev must become a strong president and Putin as a politician who is not old and is not weak must reform the inertia of his leadership into something new. For the moment this is an open situation.

In many ways, Pavlovsky, a longtime Kremlin spinmeister who heads the Effective Policy Foundation, is a barometer of the Russian elite. He is the consummate insider who knows where the political winds are blowing. In fact, he is one of a handful of people who makes the political winds blow.

And he is saying, very clearly and very publicly, that the political winds are no longer at Putin's back and that he needs to step aside and let Medvedev come into his own:

If the Putin majority suspect that in 2012 a prolongation of the status quo awaits them, they will mutiny and cease to exist in their current capacity. Moreover, if it feels in 2010 that it has been locked in for a long time in the current more and more dangerous situation, it will also become more active in an unpredictable manner.

Writing on the increasingly influential website Slon.ru, the blogger Konstantin Gaaze opined that "for those in the know, all the signs of a policy text are present" in the Pavlovsky interview. Gaaze adds: "Pavlovskiy's message is simple: the time has come for Medvedev to hire a team. And then the 'Medvedev Majority' will be formed."

Pavlovsky's interview leaves me with a few questions that I suspect we will see answered soon enough.

Is this a trial balloon or some kind a provocation? If not, are a critical mass of the elite actually on board with Medvedev becoming a "real" president? Is Putin? Are the siloviki? And if they are, what did Medvedev have to promise to get them on board?

And if everybody is not on board, is a decisive showdown looming on the horizon?

At the very least, this puts Medvedev's recent moves against Russia's powerful state corporations and his efforts to get an ally named Prosecutor-General in a whole new light. Not to mention, that little bonding session the president and premier had in Sochi.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:pavlovsky, Vladimir Putin, medvedev

Hidden Agendas

US President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev

Posted At: 16 August 16:47

Did U.S. President Barack Obama have a secret agenda during his visit to Moscow in July? Some Russian media thinks so.

Earlier this month, the weekly "Argumenti nedeli" wrote that Obama's "main objective" in his July visit was to test "the durability of the Putin-Medvedev tandem" and to "identify the key person to place their bets on."

According to "Argumenti nedeli," the White House is clearly placing its hopes in Medvedev and is now trying to build the president up and diminish the influence of Putin and the siloviki close to him, most notably Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin:

The principle of divide and rule is the foundation of Washington's policy, which is designed to rapidly end Vladimir Putin's influence over the economy. Washington is facilitating presidential (pro-Medvedev) commissions and offering them every kind of support in their competition against Vladimir Putin, and primarily against Igor Sechin.

During their summit in Moscow, Obama and Medvedev set up 13 presidential working groups to foster closer cooperation in areas like civil society, the economy, international security, health, and the environment. (For a complete list click here.)

It should be noted that these working groups have already caused a bit of a stir, but not from the Putin camp. Russian rights activists expressed concern about First Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov, widely considered Putin's unofficial ideologist, being named co-coordinator of the civil society working group.

Meanwhile, the official daily of the Russian government, "Rossiiskie vesti," which is obviously sympathetic to Putin, sees an even deeper conspiracy afoot:

According to our sources, some top U.S. media have received 'orders' to foster an images of 'the liberal president of Russia' and 'the dictator premier of Russia.' It is not surprising that currently the number of publications predicting an early dismissal of either Russian leader has considerably increased.

I must have missed that memo. As the Moscow elite gets more and more divided over the economic crisis, Putin's water carriers in the Russian media appear to be setting up the a new boogie man. Any schisms you see among Russia's rulers, they suggest, are the result of American meddling.

This, of course, gets things exactly backwards.

Careful readers of this blog will recall that I have written (here and here) that the White House seems to indeed be trying to take advantage of existing splits within the Russian elite by appealing to its relatively progressive and constructive wing.

But even casual readers of this blog have probably noticed that we have been writing about these widening schisms extensively (some might even say obsessively) well before Obama even took the oath of office.

Given the administration's goals with Russia, playing on these already existing divisions makes sense.

Sechin and the siloviki clan, after all, have built their legitimacy on stoking anti-Western anti-American sentiments and are not terribly interested in a meaningful reset in relations. The technocrats surrounding Medvedev, on the other hand, understand that in the current economic environment, some kind of liberalization and accommodation with the West is necessary.

Now, as Medvedev begins to take some steps to assert his authority, most notably with his moves to rein in Russia's state corporations, it looks like team Putin is gearing up its response with a media campaign (and a little bit of public bonding with Medvedev in Sochi to drive the point home).

This could get very interesting very soon.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:United States, Vladimir Putin, medvedev, obama, Russia

The Sochi Summit

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and President Dmitry Medvedev in Sochi

Posted At: 13 August 18:30

They took a walk along Sochi's seaside embankment together. They watched a football game. And when the evening was over, they shared a big friendly bear hug before going their separate ways.

Just a normal day of male bonding for Russia's ruling diarchy, President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

It seems that whenever relations between Putin and Medvedev appear strained, the two show up in Sochi together to make a public display of camaraderie.

Remember their Sochi tea party back in January?

Back then, the Russian media was filled with stories that Putin and Medvedev were at odds. Medvedev had criticized Putin's government over its handling of the economic crisis and instructed his administration to redraft a bill that would expand the definition of treason and espionage to assure that it doesn't violate human rights.

Analysts say the main tension is less between Putin and Medvedev personally than with their respective teams -- Putin's siloviki and Medvedev's civiliki -- who have diametrically opposed visions of how to deal with the economic crisis.

In the past eight months, the tension has only increased and intensified with Medvedev allies like Igor Yurgens, chairman of the Institute for Contemporary Development, suggesting that the crisis necessitates some form of liberalization.

The bonding in Sochi came as Medvedev has become increasingly frisky about asserting his authority.

He has ordered prosecutors to start an investigation of Russia's state corporations, which observers see as a potential assault on Igor Sechin, Putin's deputy prime minister and leader of the siloviki clan of security service veterans. The president also appears to be trying to get his close ally, Justice Minister Aleksandr Konovalov, appointed Prosecutor-General.

Few would seriously argue that Putin doesn't still hold the upper hand with his ironclad control of the security services. If push comes to shove, Medvedev's team of lawyers, economists, and technocrats are no match for the FSB, after all.

But in a nose-diving economy, those technocrats might be Russia's best hope and Medveddev seems to understand this.

We of course don't know what -- if anything -- of substance Putin and Medvedev talked about in Sochi. The whole thing could have been nothing more than a pr exercise and the alleged tension between the two could be nothing but a ruse, a game of good cop-bad cop.

But the more this drags on, the more convinced I become that the tension is real, growing, and merits close scrutiny.

With its centuries-long tradition of domineering rulers, Russia has historically not fared well when power was shared at the very top. With some exceptions, divided government has tended to lead to deep splits in the bureaucracy, backroom intrigue, vicious infighting, and often crippling instability.

And sooner or later, one side will win out.

In March 2008, months before Medvedev was sworn in as president, I asked the Moscow- based analyst Andrei Ryabov how he thought the diarchy would work. Ryabov, who I consider to be one of the more astute observers of Russian politics, predicted conflict between the Putin and Medvedev teams, despite the outwardly warm relations between the two:

What we have is not just a conflict of interests, but a conflict between visions of Russia's future and the future of Russian politics. Under the conditions of this institutional diarchy, as it has been called, it is not possible to combine these different views and policies. Somebody from the center, probably in a short period of time, must take a leading role and impose their views on the future of Russian politics.

Russian television noted that Medvedev smiled broadly for the cameras when he and Putin hugged at the end of their meeting. But the president's smile faded and his facial expression became deadly serious as turned away and got into his car.

That reckoning may be coming sooner than we think. It is, after all, August.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:diarchy, sochi, Vladimir Putin, medvedev

The Power Horizontal

Teenage girls work on laptop computers while wating for a bus in Moscow

Posted At: 12 August 14:13

Siloviki vs. Cyberspace

Sovereign Democracy vs. Social Networking

The Vertical vs. The Horizontal

There's been plenty of material on the tubes over the last week marking the ten-year anniversary of Vladimir Putin's rise to power.

But the piece that really caught my eye was a commentary titled "Two Anniversaries" by Igor Yakovenko, which was published this week in "Yezhednevny Zhurnal." (h/t to Paul Goble over at Window On Eurasia for this post that brought it to my attention.)

Yakovenko, the general secretary of the Russian Journalists' Union, notes that Putin's rise a decade ago coincided with the establishment of the blog Live Journal, which has since become a sounding board and platform for a wide range of political opinion and commentary. Live Journal's appearance, Yakovenko argues, was the true beginning of the Internet era in Russia.

Over the past ten years, as Putin and his team siloviki have been painstakingly building their authoritarian power vertical, and justifying it with the ideology of sovereign democracy, Yakovenko says a quiet counter-revolution has been gathering steam below the decks:

Putin's 'vertical' has cut itself off from the population by eliminating elections and erecting a border between itself and the population...a border much more effective than the state borders of the Russian Federation. As a result, the population has begun to build their lives and channels of communications independent of the authorities. They have begun to build their 'horizontal.'

The building blocks of the horizontal have evolved over time -- from Live Journal to Facebook to Twitter and Skype -- allowing like-minded Russians to stay informed, network with each other, and remain plugged into a global culture.

Yakovenko says the horizontal's battle against the vertical often "looks ridiculous" -- like "David fighting Goliath or Guttenberg challenging the church's monopoly on the truth." But he adds that when the vertical looks at the horizontal "it always sees its imminent death."

For most of the past decade, the Kremlin has concentrated most of its censorship efforts on controlling the macro narrative -- meaning television -- while largely leaving the Internet (and even a lot of print media) alone. Who cares if a few malcontents in Moscow vent their frustration online, they reasoned, as long as we control the airwaves -- and the masses.

But the role Twitter and Facebook played in the recent Iranian and Moldovan elections appears to be causing a rethink. And the first big target seems to be Skype and other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone services.

Late last month, the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs warned that Skype and other foreign VoIP services are a threat to national security (and their corporate profits), in part because they are resistant to eavesdropping by the intelligence services:

Without government restrictions, IP telephony causes certain concerns about security. Most of the service operators working in Russia, such as Skype and Icq, are foreign. It is therefore necessary to protect the native companies in this sector.

There is little doubt that the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs was working hand-in-glove with the authorities. The union has established a working group with the ruling United Russia party to draft legislation to safeguard against the risks posed by Skype and other VoIP services.

With the economy tanking, living standards eroding, and citizens getting restless, the last thing the authorities need is a for people to be Skyping and Tweating their discontent until it snowballs into uncontrollable social unrest.

And in case efforts to prevent cyber-discontent from turning into street action fail, the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi recently announced plans to form militias, made up of disadvantaged teenagers armed with stun guns, to patrol Russia's streets to quell potential unrest.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:yakovenko, vertical, horizontal, Internet, Vladimir Putin, Russia

Medvedev's Next Move?

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev

Posted At: 11 August 15:24

Is President Dmitry Medvedev trying to maneuver an old law school colleague Aleksandr Konovalov into the Prosecutor-General's Office?

There was enough speculation last month that Konovalov, currently Russia's justice minister, felt the need to issue a public (albeit weak) denial:

At this point we can say only one thing: this information is the result of rumors, or I should say, it comes from gossip. This is a national sport in Russia, but it is a sport that I do not participate in.

Nevertheless, Konovalov's star continues to rise. "Nezavisimaya gazeta," in its latest monthly list of Russia's 100 most influential politicians, ranked Konovalov 26th -- eleven places higher than in June, when he ranked 37th. And as "Nezavisimaya gazeta" points out in its analysis of the list, Konovalov is now more influential than current Prosecutor-General Yury Chaika (who ranks 31st).

This, of course, could mean nothing. Or it could be huge.

If Medvedev can put a close ally like Konovalov in the Prosecutor-General's post it would go a long way toward dispelling the conventional wisdom that he is merely a symbolic president. It would also undermine the influence of his arch nemesis, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, and the siloviki clan of security service veterans who have long held sway over law-enforcement in general and the Prosecutor-General's office in particular.

In recent months, Medvedev has been slowly but surely increasing his authority by using his power of appointment.

In a recent article in "Russian Profile," Graham Stack writes that Medvedev has been filling the bureaucracy with "civiliki" (officials with backgrounds in civil law) to counter Putin's clan of siloviki:

Medvedev’s background in law does not just serve him intellectually, but as a source of personnel appointments. Besides [German] Gref, who now heads Russia’s largest bank, the state-owned Sberbank, the new Minister of Justice Alexander Konovalov also studied and taught alongside Medvedev in Petersburg in the 1990s, where he lectured on Roman and civil law.

From among Medvedev’s undergraduate classmates (class of '87), Konstantin Chuichenko heads the Central Control Directorate in the presidential administration, Nikolai Vinnichenko is presidential envoy to the Urals Federal District, Artur Parfenchikov heads the State Bailiffs Service, Nikolai Gutsan is deputy prosecutor general, and Valeriya Adamova chairs the Moscow Arbitration Court. About a dozen other colleagues and classmates are scattered through the top echelons of the state as well as Gazprom.

Moreover, as fellow Power Verticalista Robert Coalson points out here (citing three posts in the always informative Russia Monitor blog), Medvedev has also been building a base of support in the Federal Bailiffs Service (FBS).

The president apparently feels confident enough in his power to order an investigation of state corporations that appears to be targeting Russian Technologies head Sergei Chemezov, a close Sechin ally.

Meanwhile, at the justice ministry, Konovalov has been shaking up the staff and consolidating his authority. Most notably, as Aleksei Makarkin points out in an article at Politkom.ru, Konovalov has replaced almost all of the deputies who worked under former Justice Minister Vladimir Ustinov -- another Sechin ally (and in-law) who preceeded Chaika as Prosecutor-General.

Over at Russia Monitor, Jesse Heath speculates that the housecleaning at justice might be a prelude to Konovalov being promoted to Prosecutor-General:

These events will likely fuel the speculation as to whether or, in my opinion, when Konovalov will leave the Ministry of Justice to bigger and better things, possibly replacing Chaika as Prosecutor-General of Russia...Perhaps real change cannot take place until after Medvedev's reelection, which was of course the case for many of Putin's major personnel changes.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:justice, ministry, sechin, konovalov, prosecutor-general's, office, medvedev

Affairs Of State

Sergei Chemezov of Russian Technologies

Posted At: 10 August 17:07

This could be the start of something big.

President Dmitry Medvedev has ordered an investigation into Russia's state corporations to determine how effectively they work, how efficiently they use their assets, and the degree to which they are complying with the law.

If Medvedev is serious about the probe and if he has the political muscle to see it through -- two very very big ifs -- the move could represent a serious blow to the statist system established by Vladimir Putin.

The state corporations -- Russian Technologies, the bank VEB, the nanotechnology firm Rosnano, the nuclear agency Rosatom, the Olympic construction firm Olympstroi, the Housing Maintenance Fund, and the Deposit Insurance Agency -- were supposed to form the backbone of Putin's authoritarian modernization of Russia's economy.

They were given access to massive funds, were allowed to operate with little oversight, and were exempt from disclosure requirements.

That was fine when oil was near $150 a barrel and Russia's economy was booming.

Now it is a big problem.

Top officials, including Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin and presidential aide Arkady Dvorkovich, say these behemoths are a drag on the economy and need to be reined in.

But this being Russia, there is also a political subtext. The biggest advocate of the state corporation model is Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the bete noire of Russia's elite and the informal leader of the siloviki clan of security service veterans surrounding Putin.

Sechin and Kudrin have long been in a state of low-intensity bureaucratic war that the deepening economic crisis has only served to intensify.

So it is not surprising that, according to several observers, one of the main targets of the probe appears to be a close Sechin ally, Sergei Chemezov, the head of Russian Technologies.

"Russian Technologies was given the honorable mission of modernizing Russian industry. In essence, this meant a partial return to a model of the Soviet Union late 1970s, in which the military-industrial complex was supported with oil windfall profits," wrote economic analyst Maksim Blant in a recent column in Newsru.com.

When the price of oil tanked late last year, Blant wrote, Chemezov's mission was changed to providing "technological breakthroughs." That, it appears, is a lot harder than spending petrodollars.

Russian Technologies also owns a 25 percent stake in the troubled automaker AvtoVAZ, which saw some 2,000 workers take to the streets in Tolyatti last week to protest cuts in working hours and demand that the factory be nationalized.

In another sign that Chemezov has fallen from grace, the Kremlin announced on August 6 that he has been removed from a presidential commission on economic modernization.

Speaking to RosBalt, Yevgeny Minchenko, president of the International Institute of Political Expertise, says the Kremlin is putting Chemezov on notice:

This should not be interpreted as a direct attack on Chemezov. The game is more subtle than that. It is instead a warning that he needs to get it together and strengthen his management or else stricter measures will be taken.

As we have written here on several occasions, competing wings of the Russian political elite have drawn diametrically opposed lessons from the financial crisis. Kudrin and the bean-counting technocrats say it underscores the need for a dose of (limited) liberalization and decentralization while Sechin and the siloviki are trying to cling to the status quo and strengthen the state's hand in the economy.

Medvedev appears to have shown his hand to an extent, but big questions remain. Does the president have the political will and political strength to follow through? Will Putin back up his protege? And how will Sechin react to this move against his political ally?

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:sergei, corporations, technologies, chemezov, state, russian, medvedev, Russia

The August Syndrome

Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev returns to Moscow from the Crimea on August 22, 1991 after a hardline coup failed.

Posted At: 31 July 17:39

Brace yourselves, Russia watchers. August is upon us.

For most of the world, the eighth month of the year is a time to relax, kick back, and go on vacation.

But in post-Soviet Russia, it has been a time of coup attempts, debilitating economic crises, financial meltdowns, bombings, and wars.

The trend, of course, started on August 19, 1991, when Communist hard-liners attempted to oust Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev -- but instead precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ever since then, Russia has been plagued by what RIA-Novosti dubbed "The Black August Syndrome."

Being familiar with Russian affairs, readers of this blog will know the really big crises that have come down in August: the debt default and currency collapse on August 17, 1998; the invasion of Daghestan by Chechen fighters on August 7, 1999 that sparked the second Chechen conflict, and last summer's five-day war between Russia and Georgia that began on August 7.

But there's more:

The war in Abkhazia, in which Moscow-backed separatists battled Georgian forces began on August 14, 1992
The infamous MMM pyramid scheme collapsed in August 1994, depriving millions of Russians of their life savings
A bomb exploded in the pedestrian underpass near the Pushkin Square metro station in downtown Moscow on August 8, 2000, killing 13 people
The Russian nuclear submarine "Kursk" sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, killing all 118 sailors on board
On August 1, 2003, a suicide bomber attacked a military hospital in Mozdok, in North Ossetia, killing over 50 people
And on August 31, 2004 -- one day before the Beslan school siege -- a suicide bomber blew herself up outside Moscow's Rizhskaya metrostation, killing 10 people

Take a look at the RIA-Novosti story for a more complete list.

August sometimes figured large in the Soviet Union as well. It was on August 20-21, 1968 that Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia, putting an end to the Prague Spring and "Socialism With A Human Face."

And as my co-Power Verticalist Robert Coalson has pointed out, Russia's current political era began in August. It was on the morning of August 9, 1999 when President Boris Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin prime minister and anointed him as his chosen successor.

So what awaits us in the next 31 days? I don't pretend to know. Maybe this August will be uncharacteristically quiet. But I will certainly hold off on taking my vacation until September.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:august, Russia

Reset 2.0

U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin

Posted At: 28 July 14:32

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's tough and blunt comments about Russia in a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal appear to have surprised more than a few people in Moscow and Washington.

They shouldn't have. Far from coming out of the blue, being out of step, or off message as some observers have suggested, Biden's remarks actually fit into a pattern that has emerged over the past month as the White House tweaks its Russia policy in response to the Kremlin's recent behavior.

Call it a reset of the reset.

Washington's rhetoric toward Moscow has taken a considerably sharper turn since mid-June when Moscow vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution, co-sponsored by the United States, that would have extended the UN mandate in Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia region. The vote was 10-1 in favor of extending the mandate, with Russia standing alone and isolated.

Shortly after that veto, President Barack Obama sparked a mini-controversy on the eve of his visit to Moscow when, in an interview with the Associated Press, he praised his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev -- but added that Russia Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has "one foot in the old ways of doing business."

As I wrote at the time, Obama appeared to be trying to drive a wedge through the Russian elite, which is deeply divided between factions drawing diametrically opposed lessons from the mushrooming economic crisis. The technocrats surrounding Medvedev favor economic reform, decentralization, and liberalization. The "siloviki" close to Putin want to dig in their heels and preserve the status quo.

Now let's look at Biden's controversial comments to the Wall Street Journal's Peter Spiegel, made after his four-day visit to Kyiv and Tbilisi, in which he suggests that Russia's weakening economy will cause it to eventually become more pliant in foreign affairs.

Biden said "Russia has to make some very difficult, calculated decisions" and that Washington "vastly" underestimates its hand vis-à-vis the Kremlin:

The reality is the Russians are where they are. They have a shrinking population base, they have a withering economy, they have a banking sector and structure that is not likely to be able to withstand the next 15 years, they're in a situation where the world is changing before them and they're clinging to something in the past that is not sustainable.

Biden went on to say that the Russian leaders "aren't absolute average-intellect ideologues who are clinging to something nobody believes in. They're pretty pragmatic in the end."

Biden's remarks, seen in their proper context, seem to be a continuation of the message Obama sent before his departure for Moscow. In each case, the administration was appealing to the relatively progressive part of the Moscow elite (and in the Russian elite, progressive is always a very relative term) and sending a warning to the more retrograde elements.

Moreover, Biden was characteristically blunt in his remarks about Russia during his entire visit Ukraine and Georgia last week. He reiterated U.S. support for both country's NATO bids, said Washington would never recognize breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia as independent states, and called on Russia to honor last August's ceasefire agreement and withdraw its forces from Georgian territory.

But Reset 2.0 goes beyond mere rhetoric.

Senior Georgian officials have told RFE/RL that behind the scenes in Moscow, Obama warned Medvedev and Putin in no uncertain terms against starting a new war with Georgia.

The officials said Tbilisi was informed by U.S. officials that Obama told Russia's leaders that any attack against Georgia would have "grave consequences" and that Washington "would not stand aside" in such a conflict as it did during last year's war.

A White House spokesperson declined comment on the claim (but did not deny it), saying only "we don't discuss private conversations."

Administration officials also say that Washington would consider deploying U.S. monitors to join a European Union mission observing the de facto boundaries with Abkhazia and South Ossetia if the EU agrees to this. Georgia has been pressing hard for U.S. monitors, arguing correctly that their presence on the border would have an added deterrent effect against any fresh Russian incursion.

So Washington is ratcheting up the pressure on Moscow in words and in deeds, even as it talks about a new era of cooperation. Will it work?

In a compelling and well-argued piece in Stratfor.com, George Friedman writes that "the Russians certainly now understand what it means to hit the reset button Obama has referred to: The reset is back to the 1980s and 1990s" when a weak economy limited Moscow's foreign policy options.

Biden’s visit and interview show the Obama administration is maintaining the U.S. stance on Russia that has been in place since the Reagan years. Reagan saw the economy as Russia’s basic weakness. He felt that the greater the pressure on the Russian economy, the more forthcoming the Russians would be on geopolitical matters. The more concessions they made on geopolitical matters, the weaker their hold on Eastern Europe.

In today's context, Eastern Europe means Georgia and Ukraine.

But Friedman warns that the 1980s and 1990s, when Moscow's economic woes led to geopolitical weakness, were actually an exception. Historically, Russia has been able to "decouple" its economy, which has been weak for most of its history, from its military capabilities. It has done so by squeezing its population economically, depriving it is basic comforts to divert resources to the military, and by brutally oppressing political dissent, and Friedman argues that it could do so again:

In the long run, the solution [for Russia] is not improving the economy — that would be difficult, if not outright impossible, for a country as large and lightly populated as Russia. Rather, the solution is accepting that Russia’s economic weakness is endemic and creating a regime that allows Russia to be a great power in spite of that. Such a regime is the one that can create military power in the face of broad poverty, something we will call the 'Chekist state.' This state uses its security apparatus, now known as the FSB, to control the public through repression, freeing the state to allocate resources to the military as needed. In other words, this is Putin coming full circle to his KGB roots.

Friedman's argument is solid. But I think that what worked in the past may be quite problematic for Russia to pull off today.

For the past decade, Russians have willingly sacrificed political rights in exchange for rising living standards -- that has been Putin's vaunted social contract, his grand bargain. And as a result, Russians now expect rising prosperity.

Today's Russians are not the Russians of the 1930s or even the 1970s. Now that a wide section of the population has experienced a decade of growth, tt is far from certain that they would accept economic deprivation together with political repression anymore -- at least without serious and destabilizing social unrest. And if the Kremlin elite understands this, then they also understand that the only alternative is reform and accommodation with the West.

This is apparently what the administration is counting on.

Moscow has shown no signs of mellowing just yet. In fact, as soon as Obama left Russia, Medvedev made a high-profile trip to South Ossetia. And as Biden was meeting Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili last week, the Russian foreign ministry warned that Moscow would take measures to prevent Tbilisi from rearming.

But as usual, Obama is playing long-ball -- setting the stage now for political benefits down the road. As one U.S. official put it, "there is not a quarterly bottom line here. This is a process."

And a very high-stakes process at that.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:biden, economy, Georgia, Vladimir Putin, medvedev, obama, Russia

A Decade With Putin

Yeltsin leaving the Kremlin on December 31, 1999.

Posted At: 27 July 14:11

We are fast coming up on the 10th anniversary of Putinism. On August 9, 1999, Putin was named first deputy prime minister after the government of Sergei Stepashin was dismissed. The same day, President Boris Yeltsin named Putin acting prime minister and anointed him the presidential successor. On August 16, the Duma approved Putin as premier, making him Russia’s fifth prime minister in 18 months. And the rest is history: Yeltsin resigned on New Year’s Eve, and Putin was elected president on March 26, 2000.

So I suppose we can expect a lot of anniversary reflections over the next few weeks. The Levada Center got things rolling with a new poll on opinions about Putin. The interesting thing about the Levada poll is the stability of the views expressed over the span of the last five years. Twenty-two percent of respondents now say that Putin’s greatest achievement has been raising living standards (including wages and pensions), while 24 percent held that view in March 2004. In the latest poll, 17 percent responded that his main achievement was “the economic development of the country,” while 9 percent lauded his role in “raising optimism and hope for short-term improvements.” Only 8 percent said Putin had no significant achievements, a figure that was down from 12 percent in 2004, but up from the 5 percent registered in March 2008.

On the other hand, 35 percent of respondents said Putin had been least effective in combating corruption (President Dmitry Medvedev’s signature issue!), while 23 percent said he’d done worst at “subduing the oligarchs.”

Asked about changes in the gap between rich and poor since the Yeltsin years, 48 percent said the gap had increased, while another 31 percent said it remained the same. Only 15 percent believe the gap has been narrowed.

And why is Putin so popular? Thirty-five percent said it is because people believe Putin is capable of coping with the problems the country faces. However, 31 percent said Putin is supported because “people don’t see anyone else they can count on,” a reflection of the Kremlin’s iron-fisted control of the central media. Nonetheless, 63 percent of respondents said the fact that “practically all power in the country” is concentrated in Putin’s hands is “good for the country.” Just 16 percent disagreed with that view.

Gazeta.ru today published a really interesting commentary by veteran journalist Boris Tumanov that starts to lay some of the theoretical groundwork for looking at a decade of Putinism. It also, by the way, sheds interesting light on the ongoing debate about interpretations (falsifications) of history generally. Tumanov writes that “Russia is the only country in the world here history revels in the subjunctive mood,” and marvels that the country “still can’t decide whether the hecatomb of Stalinism was a monstrous crime or a great boon for the country.”

Anyway, Tumanov challenges the notion that if Russia had carried out a sweeping lustration (a process of exposing and barring from public life people who had worked in high Soviet posts, in the security organs, or the military leadership), then Putinism might not have happened. By the way, he calls what we have seen over the last decade “the revanche of the sovok” (sovok being a colloquial word for Soviet-minded people). I am one of those who feels the lack of lustration in Russia was and is a major obstacle to the country’s democratic development, so I read Tumanov’s take with great interest.

Tumanov basically argues that the urge to restore elements of the Soviet system began not in 1999, but in 1993 or even earlier. He argues that the results would have been largely the same if Yeltsin and Boris Berezovsky “had chosen not an ex-chekist from Petersburg, but a Petersburg lawyer or the head of a furniture store. Or even someone from Vladivostok or Novocherkassk.” No choice would have “altered the intractable clan nature of power in Russia.” Essentially, he says, anyone Yeltsin had chosen would have divided the spoils among his “own people” – people from his hometown, or people he’d studied with or people from the government agencies where he’d made his career.

The return of the sovok is inevitable in a society “where people silently endure any humiliation on the part of their own government but are outraged at the very thought that the United States might not ‘respect’ Russia or, worse ‘isn’t afraid’ of Russia.”

--Robert Coalson

Tags:Vladimir Putin, Russia

The Russian Road To China

A Road in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East

Posted At: 15 July 14:39

Since Vladimir Putin rose to the pinnacle of power nearly a decade ago, the Russian elite has been fond of holding up the orderly Chinese model of authoritarian economic modernization as a better path to follow than chaotic and messy Western-style democracy.

Modernization, of course, encompasses many things. But as a fascinating article in "Vedomosti" on July 13 points out, an important element is infrastructure improvement:

Rapid development is impossible without roads, reliable power supplies, communications, and ease of movement. Every country that modernizes its economy encounters this obstacle and eventually remedies the situation. Those that fail remain stuck in the past.

So how is Russia doing on this score? And how does it compare to its Chinese role models?

"Unfortunately, there is nothing for Russia to brag about in this particular area," writes the article's author, Vladislav Inozemtsev, director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies and Free Thought.

Let's look at some statistics.

In 2008, at the peak of Russia's oil boom, it built just 2,300 kilometers of highway. According to Inozemtsev, this is what China builds on average in just ten days.

And how do costs compare? In China, Inozemtsev writes, a kilometer of four-lane highway costs $2.9 million. In Russia it costs more than four times that -- a staggering $12.9 million!

And the trend is not just confined to roads. It is costs more than three times as much to construct warehouses in Russia as in China, and more than twice as much as in Brazil. In fact, Inozemtsev points out that warehouse construction in Russia costs more than in France or Germany.

The Russian state grossly overpays for construction ... because those who associate themselves with the state are parasites. Almost $230 billion was poured into Russian infrastructure projects between 2006 and 2008 - and there is practically nothing to show for it. It is no wonder that this market is completely non-transparent and off limits to foreign companies. And it is not surprising that the cost of participating in this market increases by 25-40 percent each year.

Nearly a decade of oil-fueled economic growth and little to show for it once the petrodollars stopped rolling except for a bloated oligarchic class that got rich on its ties to the state.

This, in short, is one of the main reasons Russia's Putin-era elite is finding itself in so much trouble today. As I have written here, instead of building roads and infrastructure, they chose to use oil wealth to build something called "sovereign democracy."

Even by their own standards of a Chinese-style modernization, the current regime comes up short.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:infrastructure, modernization, roads, economic, china, Russia

The Price Of Influence

Patriarch Kirill and President Dmitry Medvedev in the Kremlin.

Posted At: 10 July 16:11

What motivated United Russia and Patriarch Kirill I to reach an agreement giving the Russian Orthodox Church an unprecedented voice in the legislative work of the State Duma?

Aleksei Malashenko of the Moscow Carnegie Center tackles the issue in today's issue of "Nezavisimaya Gazeta."

He begins by asking why the ruling party would want to enter into such an arrangement:

Why? Because United Russia desperately lacks something despite its triumphs in elections throughout the country and the overwhelming majority in the lower house of the parliament. And what does it lack? It lacks society's respect. It lacks recognition as a genuine political party and not just an organization founded and coddled by the Kremlin.

Because the crisis will inevitably require unpopular decisions that will be endorsed (blessed) by the Patriarch as a means to temper society's discontent.

Because the crisis might foment social unrest and it will certainly benefit the ruling party to have such a formidable an ally.

And last but not the least, because United Russia would like to share responsibility for its actions and transform the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia into Vladimir Gundayev, supporter of the ruling party ever ready with religious authorization.

Vladimir Gundayev, it should be noted, is Patriarch Kirill's birth name.

So what's in the deal for the Kirill?

Such an appeal cannot help being flattering. The Patriarch climbed the political mountain and nearly reached the very top. But how are the believers expected to regard their spiritual authority whose influence is higher than that of Moscow Mayor [Yury] Luzhkov but less than that of [Vladislav] Surkov from the Presidential Administration?

But Malashenko writes that the move carries risks for the patriarch and the church:

Involvement with mundane secular affairs will erode the respect the Patriarch's office commands. The Russian Orthodox Church will soon be regarded as a state structure which is hardly an asset...

The so called duumvirate may eventually evolve into a triumvirate. A grandiose leap from the standpoint of democracy, of course, but common sense is what it will be definitely lacking.

Gundayev is a gifted man. As the Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, he is extremely popular. Why waste this popularity?

As I wrote in my last post, Kirill clearly wants to influence legislation on issues like sex education. According to media reports, the patriarch was the one who initiated the meeting with United Russia that led to their informal arrangement. As a result, the church just got an even bigger voice in the affairs of state than it already had. But that voice comes with a price.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:united, kirill, state, church, i, Russia

From A Diarchy To A Troika?

Medvedev, Putin, and Kirill

Posted At: 09 July 18:17

Patriarch Kirill I has not been shy about flexing his political muscles since being enthroned in February. Now it seems he will be granted a semi-formal role in shaping legislation.

Gazeta.ru is reporting that Kirill met on July 8 with representatives from the ruling United Russia party to hammer out the church's legislative role.

Here's how Andrei Isaev, a leading United Russia member who heads the State Duma's Committee for Social Policy, described the results:

We agreed to inform the church of legislation that we are working on that is of interest to the patriarch. These bills will be sent to the church so they can study them and let us know if they have any objections or suggestions.

There is nothing unusual in this. When we work on labor issues we discuss them with trade unions. In the same way, we will discuss spiritual and moral issues with the church.

And it seems that Kirill already has some moral and spiritual issues on his mind. Specifically, he is seeking to keep sex education out of Russia's schools.

In May, Russia ratified the European Social Charter, which calls for health education in schools, including sex education. Kirill is determined to make sure this doesn't happen when the Duma codefies the charter into Russian law.

And what about other denominations and other confessions? Will they have a voice in the Duma's business as well? Here's what Isaev had to say about that:

The Russian Orthodox Church initiated this themselves. They are the only church that has done so. If other religions want to participate in the work of the legislature, they can appeal to us. If they represent a significant portion of the electorate, we will consider their request.

The clause "if they represent a significant portion of the electorate," it seems, speaks volumes about the authorities' attitudes toward religious minorities. Any other denomination or religion, of course, is going to be dwarfed by Orthodox Christianity in terms of representation among voters.

What is going on between the Orthodox Church and the Russian state appears to be much more than just routine lobbying.

Instead, church and state are increasingly acting in concert and Orthodoxy seems be inching closer and closer to becoming a de facto state religion.

Russian public schools, for example, have been incorporating Orthodox Christianity as a required part of their curriculum in some regions. This is causing fierce opposition in predominantly Muslim regions like Tatarstan.

But anybody who speaks out too loudly against the church, can easily find themselves in trouble with the law.

As Paul Goble blogged reported over at Window On Eurasia back in April, Tatar activist who wrote an article protesting the baptism of infants by Orthodox priests without the knowledge of their parents was convicted of "provoking interethnic and inter-religious hostility."

One has to wonder, given these trends and Kirill's rising influence, if Russia's much-discussed diarchy of Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin is on the way to becoming a de facto troika.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:patriarch, kirill, duma, state, orthodox, church

The American President And The Russian Opposition

Nemtsov and Ryzhkov in RFE/RL's Studio With Mikhael Sokolov

Posted At: 08 July 18:07

I am always intrigued -- although rarely surprised -- about how different media accounts of the exact same event can create almost diametrically opposed impressions.

Today's issue of "Vedomosti" ran a story about U.S. President Barack Obama's July 7 meeting with opposition leaders under the following headline: "Almost Without Criticism. Russian Human Rights Activists and Politicians Met With U.S. President Obama: Complaints Failed To Win His Sympathies."

Here's the money graf:

Obama disappointed them. The US president had no solutions to offer. Boris Nemtsov of Solidarity announced that future development of relations between our countries required Russia's return to democracy. Obama wholly agreed with Nemtsov but pointed out that as president, he had to take things as they were.

Funny thing is, RFE/RL's Russian Service had Nemtsov as well as opposition figure Vladimir Ryzhkov in the studio right after the meeting with Obama. To say they were upbeat and satisfied with the meeting would be a gross understatement.

(You can read a transcript of the whole program in Russian, moderated by RFE/RL's Mikhail Sokolov, here. You can listen to the program here.)

Here is what Ryzhkov had to say about the meeting as a whole:

I wouldn't call this an 'audience.' President Obama is not a shah, emir, or a sultan. He is a democratically elected president who won a very tough election battle. So this was a meeting of one democrat with other democrats and it was very businesslike... The meeting lasted for an hour and we covered all the hot topics related to democracy and human rights in our country. We discussed the Yukos case, freedom of expression, the absence of free elections, the inability of opposition parties to register, the violent break-up of peaceful demonstrations, and Garry Kasparov presented President Obama with a list of political prisoners in Russia. I think that after this meeting, President Obama has an accurate view of what 'sovereign democracy' is and how difficult it is for the opposition and civil society in our country.

Ryzhkov went on to say that on one hand Obama urged patience, but also encouraged them to be persistent in pursuit of their values and goals:

He said he discussed these issues with President Medvedev, including the situation in our justice system. He asked us to try to be patient and he told us to pay attention to our president's rhetoric -- about how 'freedom is better than the lack of freedom,' about democracy, about the rule of law -- and to how much this rhetoric will be reflected in reality. He also said that he understands our pessimism...He said each one of us needs to push the rock up the mountain because every change begins with small steps. We need to believe and not be skeptics and cynics and continue with our work. People who believe in democracy and human rights need to continue their fight.

Ryzhkov also noted that Obama "had an opportunity to experience our bureaucracy" when, as a U.S. Senator visiting Russia in 2005, he and Senator Richard Lugar had their flight detained for three hours at the Perm airport because customs officials wanted to search their aircraft. Ryzhkov went on to praise Obama's knowledge of Russian affairs:

He has an excellent team, some of the best Russia specialists in America...He is completely informed and it is very important for him to get a realistic picture of Russia and I think he has one. This is not a naive politician. This is not someone who arrived in a country that he doesn't understand. He has an excellent understanding of the situation here. He is addressing the issues here that he has to address as the American president. But I want to stress that the fact that he spent most of the day interacting with society is a strong signal.

For his part, Nemtsov said the opposition "raised all the principled issues: The absence of free democratic elections, the presence of out-of-control corruption, the existence of a monopolistic state system, the fact that there are political prisoners."

Nemtsov went on to say that he sympathized with the delicate balancing act Obama needs to perform, working with the current Russian authorities to address issues like Afghanistan, Iran, and arms control, while at the same time supporting democracy and human rights:

The American President needs to solve very important global issues. And he told us that he understands the problems in Russia. He also said 'I am the president right now and today and I need to solve problems of the United States and the world right now and today, together with Russia. I understand that there isn't the rule of law and an independent judiciary, but we still need to make progress on important issues.' In my opinion this is very reasonable. Of course this can't be a strategic long-term way to approach things, but from the point of view of moving forward and making the world safer, it is correct.

And finally, Nemtsov stressed that he doesn't expect Obama to fight the opposition's battles:

Liberating Russia from this corrupt bureaucracy is not Obama's obligation, it is ours. This is our battle. We don't expect help from abroad. But we believe that America as a great world power and President Obama as a world leader must know what kind of condition Russia's political system is in. We also need to strengthen our contacts with America.

Nemtsov and Ryzhkov, of course, were just two of the nine opposition figures present at the meeting. Perhaps there were others present who were indeed dissatisfied.

We'll be watching closely for the impressions of others.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:nemtsov, ryzhkov, opposition, obama, Russia

The Presidents, The Ideologist, And the Reset

President Dmitry Medvedev (foreground) with U.S. President Barack Obama at the Kremlin

Posted At: 08 July 15:06

U.S. President Barack Obama's overtures to Russian society at the Moscow summit are already causing tremors.

A group of prominent Russian human rights and civic activists have written an open letter to Presidents Obama and Dmitry Medvedev protesting First Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov's appointment as co-coordinator of a bilateral working group on civil society.

The working group, which will be coordinated on the U.S. side by Obama's senior Russia advisor Michael McFaul, is one of 13 that was established by Medvedev and Obama during this week's summit to foster closer cooperation between the two societies.

Not surprisingly, 22 activists who signed the letter are not pleased that Surkov, the Kremlin's chief ideologist -- and the godfather of "sovereign democracy" and the "power vertical" -- will be helping to coordinate cooperation between Russian and American NGOs (you can read the letter in the original Russian here):

An Appeal To Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and U.S. President Barack Obama From Representatives Of Russian Civil Society

July 7, 2009

Dear Mr. Presidents,

We the representatives of Russian civil society support the creation of a bilateral commission on issues of Russian-American relations.

At the same time, we were surprised to learn that that First Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov has been appointed to coordinate civil society issues from the Russian side.

Vladislav Surkov is associated with the most negative tendencies in the development of democracy in Russia in recent years: the rollback of press freedoms, the liquidation of competition in the political system, and the purposeful erection of barriers against the development of civil society.

For this reason we ask you, Dmitry Anatolevich, to reconsider your decision to appoint him as the Russian co-coordinator for issues of civil society.

The letter was initiated by Yevgeny Gontmakher, director of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, who has been publicly sparring with Surkov for months.

Here's what Gontmakher had to say in an interview with RFE/RL's Russian Service today:

We know very well who authored the political system that exists today in Russia, a system that has squeezed out all possibilities for discussion and which the opposition is seen as a sad spectacle. The opposition is not to blame for this. The guilty parties are those who have put them in this position and marginalized them. More than anybody, this is Mr. Surkov and his political technology.

And here's what Svetlana Gannushkina, a human rights lawyer who heads the organization Civic Assistance, said in the same broadcast:

Surkov has become very active and he appears ready to work with us. We are also ready to work with him. But his position is very clear. He isn't among those people who take civil society seriously as the state's equal partner.

Gontmakher, Gannushkina and the other 20 signatories of the letter to Obama and Medvedev are right to be concerned. Surkov has certainly been no friend of civil society during his time in the Kremlin.

But at the same time, I can't help but think that something deeper might be going on here (and the operative word here is "might" -- I am far from convinced at this point).

I have always considered Surkov to be a good barometer of where the Russian elite is moving. He has, after all, managed to work for each of Russia's three post-Soviet presidents -- Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, and Medvedev. A less charitable interpretation, of course would be that he is a political chameleon with few principles who shifts with the political winds.

In any case, there appears to have been a subtle shift in Surkov's tone in recent weeks, most notably his appeal for United Russia to cooperate with other political parties and his appeals for more "degrees of freedom" in the rigid political system he helped create.

Skepticism is still in order, but I will nevertheless be keeping a close eye on Surkov and what he has to say -- and more importantly what he does -- in the weeks and months ahead.

UPDATE: My colleague Claire Bigg just wrote an thoughtful and thorough profile of Surkov that explores in greater detail some of the issues raised in this post. It is well worth a read. Click here for more.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:surkov, gontmakher, medvedev, obama

Obama's Kremlin Gambit

Obama Medvedev meeting in London in April

Posted At: 03 July 16:59

Well, I can't say that I saw this coming.

In an interview with the Associated Press that hit the wires on July 3, U.S. President Barack Obama dropped this little bombshell on the eve of his visit to Moscow:

I have developed a very good relationship with President Medvedev... But Prime Minister Putin still has a lot of sway in Russia, and I think that it's important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev, that Putin understands that the old Cold War approaches to U.S.-Russian relations is outdated, that it's time to move forward in a different direction. I think Medvedev understands that. I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new. And to the extent that we can provide him and the Russian people a clear sense that the U.S. is not seeking an antagonistic relationship but wants cooperation on nuclear nonproliferation, fighting terrorism, energy issues, that we'll end up having a stronger partner overall in this process.

Obama's comments appear calibrated to drive a wedge right down the middle of the Russian establishment. It's a calculated risk that just might work.

The president's remarks came at a time when the Moscow elite is more divided than it has been in nearly a decade, with different factions drawing diametrically opposed lessons from the deepening economic crisis.

Some are arguing that the economic nosedive has exposed Putin's social contract -- under which Russians give up a measure of freedom in exchange for prosperity -- as hollow. They are urging political liberalization and a diversification of the economy away from its dangerous dependence on energy exports.

The most vocal advocates of this position are establishment intellectuals like Igor Yurgens, chairman of the Institute for Contemporary Development, a think tank with close ties to Medvedev, and Yevgeny Gontmakher, director of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

These establishment intellectuals appear to have at least the tacit support of government technocrats like Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, and Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina.

Others -- like the powerful Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the informal leader of the so-called "siloviki" clan of security-service veterans, and first deputy Kremlin chief of staff Vladislav Surkov, the regime's informal ideologist -- are furiously trying to maintain the status quo. They have been supported by their own crop of public intellectuals like the pro-Putin political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky.

Obama's comments came just a day after Boris Nemtsov, one of the founders of the opposition group Solidarity, said the following at a speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York:

If Obama will show that, yes, Russia has a president and his name is Medvedev, it will be very, very nice for everybody. I can tell you why [this is important] for Solidarity ...

Medvedev is not Putin. He is different. He's young; He has no mentality of the Cold War, of course, because he's just 44. He graduated the university when [Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev started perestroika in 1985. He has no KGB experience, which is great, and he has experience in private sector, which is very important.

And I believe that -- if he will finally take power, we have a chance to come back to liberalization, to democratization or, I can say, perestroika number two...

His main problem, unfortunately, is that he's weak. I don't know [if it is] possible to become stronger just after a few meetings with Obama. I don't know. But if he will help him to take power, it will be very important strategically, because if you look at Obama's background and his history, and Medvedev, the new person, it's easier for new guys to start from the beginning.

Obama is also making explicit overtures to Russia's pro-democratic forces. He has given an interview to the opposition newspaper "Novaya gazeta" that is due appear on newsstands on July 6, just as he arrives in Moscow. He is scheduled to meet with civil society groups and human rights activists on July 7. And there are even rumors circulating in Moscow, albeit unconfirmed, that he may meet with leading opposition figure Garry Kasparov.

Speaking to reporters this week, Michael McFaul, the White House National Security Council's senior director for Russian and Eurasian affairs, said Obama is seeking to establish "a direct relationship with the Russian people" -- not just with the government:

As we reset relations with the Russian government, we also want to reset relations with Russian society.... The idea here is that this is not 1974, this is not where we just go over and do an arms control agreement with the Soviets, but that we have a multidimensional relationship with the Russian government and the Russian people.

In run-up to Obama's Moscow visit, a lively debate emerged in RFE/RL's central newsroom about the president's "reset" with Russia -- and what clues we could take away from Obama's performance on Iran.

Some argued that Obama's softer, pragmatic approach would only encourage Russia's more retrograde elements. According to this argument, Obama's cautious reaction to the political upheaval in Iran set the precedent that bad behavior will go unpunished.

Others argued that the U.S. president is playing a sophisticated long-term game with both Tehran and Moscow. Advocates of this position say Obama's opening to Iran, his offer of talks and improved relations, helped widen existing cracks among the elite in Tehran and expose the fragility of what earlier appeared to be a monolithic and static political system.

Obama appears to be making a similar gambit with Russia.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:Vladimir Putin, medvedev, obama, Russia

Calling All Informants!

The Russian State Historical Museum on Red Square

Posted At: 01 July 16:34

Is the Russian Academy of Sciences soliciting informants to expose sinister plots within its ranks to falsify Russian history?

This letter to senior staff of the Historical-Philological Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences -- which was obtained by RFE/RL's Russian Service -- seems to suggest they are (here is a link to a scanned copy of the letter, from the head of the department's history section, Valery Tishkov, in the original Russian):

June 23, 2009

In accordance with the protocol decision of the bureau of the Historical-Philological Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences (OIFN RAN) entitled On the Duties of the OIFN RAN in Connection with the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation dated May 15, 20009, No. 549, entitled On the Presidential Commission Against Efforts to Falsify History to Harm the Interests of Russia we request that you present the following information to the department:

1) An annotated list of historical-cultural falsifications in the areas corresponding to the main areas of activity of your institute (indicating the main sources, individuals, or organizations developing or disseminating the falsification; the potential danger of the given falsification to the interests of Russia; and preliminary recommendations regarding measures for the scholarly refutation of the falsification);

2) Information about the activity of scholars of your institute regarding the exposure of falsifications and historical-cultural concepts that are harmful to the interests of Russia;

3) A contact person or list of scholars for participation in the work of the OIFN RAN commission on the analysis of historical-cultural falsifications that are harmful to the interests of Russia (with telephone numbers and e-mail addresses).

We request that you present this information to the Historical-Philological Department of the Russian Academy of Sciences not later than June 26, 2009.

Respectfully,

V.A. Tishkov Deputy Academician-Secretary Historical-Philological Department RAN Director of the History Section of the OIFN RAN Academician

In an interview with Vladimir Tolts of RFE/RL's Russian Service, Tishkov appeared defensive about the letter, claiming that it was just a draft and was written by his research assistant.

Tishkov also suggested that he had problems with President Dmitry Medvedev's decree on the falsification of history, adding: "I made this request so I can formulate my own position on this issue, and perhaps write an article about it for 'Izvestiya' or Rossiiskaya gazeta.'" (You can read the entire interview in Russian here)

Tolts and RFE/RL's Russian Service plan to continue following this issue closely -- and the Power Vertical will continue to blog what they find.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:history, academy, falsification, sciences, of, Russia

Requiem For Andropovism

Yury Andropov

Posted At: 30 June 18:04

Members of Vladimir Putin's inner circle have long viewed Yury Andropov's brief rule as the path not taken, the great "what if," the missed opportunity.

If Andropov had lived, the argument goes, Moscow would have pursued a program of authoritarian modernization, introducing market mechanisms similar to those in China while preserving one-party rule. He would have reformed the economy, kept the Soviet Union together, and avoided the chaos and deprivation of the Perestroika period and the 1990s.

So it is not surprising that on June 15, the 95th anniversary of Andropov's birth, Russia's Channel One aired a nostalgic laudatory film titled "Yury Andropov: 15 Months Of Hope." (The video is available in Russian here. Paul Goble over at Window On Eurasia has an insightful write up about it here)

But was Andropov's path to reform really the road not taken? For nearly a decade, Putin and his team have been systematically working to implement a 21st century version of Andropovism. And when oil prices were soaring near $150 a barrel, it even seemed to be working.

But as Leon Aron shows in an article in the latest issue of "Foreign Policy," reality is finally setting in (the whole piece is well worth a read):

Putin's regime enjoyed widespread acceptance so long as income was growing by leaps and bounds. Putin's 'authoritarian modernization' was in large measure inspired and justified by China's spectacular growth. But the Russian version of the 'Chinese miracle' has been revealed to be yet another Potemkin village. For many Russian writers, thinkers, and activists struggling to understand the legacy of Putinism, there has been too much "authoritarianism" and precious little 'modernization'...

Looking around Russia now, Putin's new critics see only the ruins of unfulfilled promises and wasted wealth...They rue the missed opportunity for a modern and transparent state and for a diversified, entrepreneur-driven economy, the foundation for which could have been laid under the more favorable market conditions of the early 2000s.

Instead of building a modern economy when oil prices were high, Putin built "Sovereign Democracy" and the "Power Vertical." That was the real missed opportunity.

This is the subtext of the criticism now coming from the likes of Igor Yurgens, Yevgeny Gontmakher, and others.

And as Aron correctly points out, the regime's most vocal critics now are "not professional 'dissidents,' long ago marginalized by the Kremlin, but members of the intellectual establishment." Rather than an Andropov revival, Aron argues that Putin's efforts have unintentionally recreated the political climate of the early Perestroika period:

The mere fact that Putin's detractors dare write as they do (until recently, many have been wary of criticizing the regime in such weighty terms) points to a possible change in the Russian political climate not unlike the very early glasnost under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986 and 1987. At that time, much of the critical writing was dismissed as elite ruminations. Yet, after the censorship was lifted, these views were embraced by millions, precipitating the Soviet collapse. In this sense, today's critics might well be a bellwether of a coming storm.

I'm not quite ready to go that far yet. Almost, but not quite. But as I have written here and elsewhere, something important is clearly happening in Russia. If not yet a thaw, I think we are witnessing the early stages of a great awakening among a key part of the intellectual establishment. The scales are falling from people's eyes. The old fear -- while not gone -- is clearly fading. The Kremlin no longer looks all powerful.

In fact, as Aron points out, it is looking more and more vulnerable:

Eventually, the Kremlin could face a stark choice: abandon the current, softer authoritarianism, which generally favors bribery and intimidation over jailing and killing, and replace it with a full-bore, hard dictatorship; or radically expand its political base by opening a dialogue with the opposition, liberalizing politics, and reducing the state's control of the economy. The first route will almost certainly be traveled without Medvedev, with Putin retaking the presidency. The other scenario has no room for Putin.

The shattering of the Putin myth, the changing intellectual environment, and the increased willingness of angry Russians to take to the streets is shaping up to be a potentially deadly cocktail for Russia's current rulers.

More than two decades after his death, we are witnessing the logical conclusion of the Andropov legacy.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:dissent, andropov, leon, aron, Vladimir Putin

The Intellectual And The Propagandist

Yevgeny Gontmakher

Posted At: 26 June 17:47

Yevgeny Gontmakher's war of words with Vladislav Surkov just won't let up.

Gontmakher, director of the Center for Social Policy at the Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published an article in "Vedomosti" back in March comparing Surkov to Leonid Brezhnev's chief ideologist, Mikhail Suslov.

One would think that Surkov would consider this a compliment. After all, as Kremlin first deputy chief of staff, Surkov has styled himself as the regime's semi-official ideologist, responsible for terms like "sovereign democracy" and the "power vertical."

But apparently he wasn't amused. In an article published last week in "Vedomisti," Gontmakher described the reaction (you can read the whole article in the original Russian here, or in the English-language version published by "The Moscow Times" here):

I became the target of a massive attack on the Internet. First, a group of bloggers and the web sites of United Russia's Young Guard attacked me, mocking my non-Russian surname, but none actually responded to the arguments I posited in my article. A few Kremlin-friendly newspapers even published long articles written by prominent political analysts, the content of which boiled down to the following: 'Gontmakher, keep your dirty paws off Surkov.'

This wasn't Gontmakher's first run in with the Kremlin.

Back in November, he published a provocative article -- again in "Vedomisti" -- warning that anti-government riots similar to those that took place in Novocherkassk back in 1962 were possible as workers in single-factory towns reeled from the economic crisis. This was when the Kremlin was twisting itself into knots trying to argue that the crisis was an American problem and wouldn't effect Russia.

Hoping to silence Gontmakher and his ilk, the authorities gave "Vedomosti" a prompt warning that the article could be considered an incitement to extremism. Instead, it led to more people reading the article, and probably encouraged more public intellectuals to come forward with criticisms of the regime.

In his article last week, Gontmakher wrote that he has learned four key lessons from his ongoing battle with Surkov:

1. The modern Russian propaganda machine permeates nearly every major media outlet and even extends to the blogosphere. But the machine breaks down under certain external factors. For example, the informational blockade of the situation in Pikalyovo was broken when state-controlled television stations were compelled to show Putin's visit there.

2. The informational and ideological lockdown is not quite as impervious as it might appear. In order to stir things up a bit, one has only to introduce some fresh and thought-provoking material into the media now and then.

3. The most important item on today's reform agenda should be a commitment to uphold the constitutional ban on state ideology. Otherwise, nothing will be achieved in the economic or social spheres, much less in politics.

4. The country has to break the habit of praising those who both brainwash the populace and defame those who oppose it. The elite controlling the propaganda machine should understand that their present positions of authority are temporary at best, and that the day will come with they will face political ostracism.

I've been giving these ongoing verbal sparring matches a disproportionate amount of space on this blog because I think something very important is happening in Russia right now.

Brave public intellectuals like Gontmakher and Igor Yurgens are risking their careers by chipping away at the philosophical justification for Russia's authoritarian regime. This may all come to nothing. But it could potentially change Russia's internal political narrative into something closer resembling the truth.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:surkov, gontmakher, vedomosti

The Punk Meets The Godfather

Bashkortstan President Murtaza Rakhimov

Posted At: 24 June 17:14

Did the Kremlin's chief ideologist just get punked by a regional leader whose political obituary was written months ago? Early signs seem to suggest that he did.

Murtaza Rakhimov, the president of Russia's Bashkortostan Republic, appeared to get himself in a bit of hot water a few weeks ago when he publicly compared the level of centralization in Russia today to that in the Soviet Union.

When the Kremlin sent its powerful First Deputy Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov to Ufa for a little chat with Rakhimov on Friday, pundits were wondering whether the wayward regional boss would survive the weekend with his job intact.

Authorities in Moscow had been systematically undermining Rakhimov's authority for months. They removed Bashkortostan's FSB chief, Interior Minister, and the heads of region's Supreme and Arbitration Courts -- all of whom were loyal to Rakhimov -- and replaced them with figures obedient to the Kremlin.

But when Surkov arrived, there was no reckoning to be had. Instead, with a straight face he praised the level of democracy in the region and lauded the locals who had rallied to support their leader.

Nikolai Petrov, an expert on regional politics at the Moscow Carnegie Center, suggests that when faced with a potential backlash from Rakhimov's supporters and other regional barons, the Kremlin blinked:

Rakhimov took a big gamble by standing up against the Kremlin. But at the same time, he strengthened his position in Bashkortostan, where the people rallied in a united front for their leader.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin, after taking all the necessary steps to remove Rakhimov from office, turned out to be politically unprepared for such a move. This is because it would have had to take on not only Rakhimov, but simultaneously do battle with several of the most powerful governors who exercise control over their political machines in the largest regions of the country.

As Pavel Baev points out at the Eurasia Daily Monitor, as the economic crisis deepens, authorities in Moscow are facing an increasingly restive group of regional leaders who are increasingly adept at exploiting the widening schisms in the Moscow elite:

Among the worst hit by the recession are such important regions as Chelyabinsk and Volgograd oblast, Krasnoyarsk krai, Tatarstan and even Moscow oblast, and their governors resent the Kremlin attempts at scapegoating them for the deepening slump.

Rakhimov is 75-years-old and the Kremlin has had it out for him for sometime now. He could very well get the boot at some point in the near future.

But Paul Goble over at Window on Eurasia writes that his survival of this latest scare -- and how it played out -- is sure to "resonate with other regional leaders," and could represent a watershed in Moscow's relations with the regions:

Indeed, at least some [regional leaders] are likely to assume that in the current economic environment, they may be able to turn the tables on the central government, given the anger many Russians feel about Moscow’s policies and given the reluctance of the center to create even more problems for itself by removing longtime leaders like Rakhimov.

To the extent that some of the heads of the federal subjects do reach that conclusion, the Rakhimov affair could represent another turning point in Moscow’s relations with the Russian Federation’s various republics, krays and oblasts and open the way for a more open and intense debate on center-periphery relations...

By remaining in office and even more by forcing Moscow to dispatch the Kremlin’s Vladislav Surkov to Ufa rather than being called on the carpet at the center, Rakhimov demonstrated that at least some regional leaders may be able to speak and act more independently than even they had believed.

Just another sign that Vladimir Putin's vaunted power vertical is getting more and more wobbly.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:surkov, rakhimov, regions

Cops, Crime, And The Crisis

Defenders or perpetrators?

Posted At: 23 June 18:02

Is Russia on the verge of a massive crime wave? Some analysts certainly think so.

In most countries, when an economy goes in the tank, crime rate tends to spike. But as political analyst Andrei Ryabov writes in "Vedomosti" this week, the well-established correlation between economic deprivation and crime takes on added -- and potentially sinister -- dimensions in Russia.

Ryabov argues that as Russians lose faith that the social and political system will continue to provide for their needs, turning to crime -- both petty and large-scale -- actually becomes a form of protest as well as a survival mechanism:

Our country's history over the past decade shows that an alternative form of social protest is possible: the criminalization of social behavior - a 'great criminal revolution' with significant layers of society being drawn into criminal activity.

There is increasing evidence that such a developments is realistic prospect. On an almost daily basis there are reports of bank robberies, armed raids, armed street, random drive-by shootings -- just like in the Roaring Nineties. Moreover, as the crisis continues and deepens, the desire to 'restore social justice' and 'take what is ours' by criminal means is increasingly evident.

But what is really a cause for concern, Ryabov argues, is the tendency for the police to get in on the act as well. As crime rates increase amid an economic downturn, law-enforcement bodies -- already notorious for rampant corruption -- are empowered to bring the situation under control.

But instead of addressing the problem, they instead use their new powers to ratchet up their own criminal activities:

There seem to be two reasons why this phenomenon is spreading within the law enforcement agencies: uncertainty about the stability of their position as a bulwark of the ruling hierarchy, and the contraction of sectors and businesses where corrupt police have usually run protection rackets. In a corrupt environment - characteristic of governance and state administration in contemporary Russia - such disappointments and grievances do usually lead to an upswing in criminalization.

The result, Ryabov says, is a vicious circle:

Instead of serving only as a tool for 'restoring order' in the social arena and maintaining its stability, various groups that are part of the hierarchy's security and enforcement component could start to play a game of their own, directly opposed to that objective. The crisis only accelerates and exacerbates this trend.

Ryabov's article, while well-argued and thought provoking, is largely speculative. But the scenario he outlines seems entirely plausible.

The legitimacy of the system Vladimir Putin created was based largely on three pillars: rising living standards, restoring social order, and resurgent (anti-Western) Russian nationalism.

The economic crisis has already undermined the first pillar. If Ryabov's argument is correct, a new crime wave could take out the second pillar as well.

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:crime, police, Russia, corruption

Russia's Hyperactive Ideologist

Deouty Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov

Posted At: 19 June 17:28

The godfather of Russia's "sovereign democracy" has been unusually visible this week.

Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov, the regime's chief ideologist, usually shuns the public spotlight. But there he was on Wednesday telling a group of young State Duma deputies that Russian democracy has matured, is stable, and needs to develop. He also raised eyebrows by calling on United Russia to cooperate with other parties:

We believe that once a system has settled, there should be more degrees of freedom inside it. One should be flexible, one should learn to enter into coalitions. Democracy is a compromise. Democracy is a procedure. It's a tedious one, but it's a procedure.

Surkov's comments appeared to contrast earlier statements he made criticizing public figures who suggested that Russia's political system needed to be opened up. They also contradict the conclusions of the Public Projects Institute, a think tank close to United Russia, which released a report last week saying greater democracy in Russia would be harmful.

So what's going on? Prior to the economic crisis, some analysts believed that the Kremlin's grand plan was to create a virtual -- read fake -- multi-party system similar to the ones that existed in some Soviet satellites like Communist-era Czechoslovakia and East Germany. (Or, more accurately, to restructure the virtual -- read fake -- multi-party system it has now)

The idea was to bring erstwhile -- or potential -- opponents of the regime into the system where they could be controlled and co-opted. This was the idea behind making former opposition figure Nikita Belykh governor of Kirov Oblast in December, for example.

It was also the idea behind the creation of the new Kremlin-friendly party Right Cause from the remnants of the opposition Union of Rightist Forces.

The economic crisis and the public discontent it sparked clearly spooked the Kremlin and the plan appeared to have been mothballed. Are Surkov's comments an indication that the elite feels safe enough to proceed?

Perhaps, but apparently not everybody is on board. Speaking to the same event on Wednesday, State Duma speaker Boris Gryzlov said there was a chance in the late Soviet period to establish a multi-party system, but that chance was missed:

There was a chance when a platform began to emerge within the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] and the possibility of splitting the CPSU into two parties was quite pressing. The country could have created a bi-partisan system, but this chance was missed. This is how I would put it. If Russia had moved over to a bi-partisan system at that time, it would have been a movement in the right direction. It was a historic chance but it was missed....

Our parliament of the majority based on one party is a necessity for Russia...The parliamentary majority allows us to adopt laws that determine political and economic stability.

Gryzlov added that given United Russia's large majority in the Duma, the party should have more of its members represented in Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's government.

It is unclear whether this is one of those staged debates the Kremlin sometimes stages to meet its PR needs of the moment, or if a real argument is afoot about the need to make (cosmetic) changes in the system to stem rising discontent. My instincts tell me it is the latter. And the fact that both Gryzlov and the Public Projects Institute are so publicly opposing any changes suggests that at least part of the United Russia leadership -- which would lose a bit of patronage power under the scheme -- is not entirely on board.

Surkov made news again today with a high-profile trip to Bashkortostan to pay a visit to regional chief Murtaza Rakhimov -- who earlier in the month created a minor scandal by comparing the level of centralization in Russia today to that of the Soviet Union. The Interfax news agency quoted an unidentified as saying that the visit will give Rakhimov "the chance to correct the situation and save face."

At least publicly, there were no recriminations. "I am very glad that there is such a high level of democracy in Bashkortostan," Surkov said of the region that Rakhimov rules like a personal fiefdom. "There is no problem here."

-- Brian Whitmore

Tags:united, gryzlov, surkov, rakhimov, duma, Russia

PreviousNext

RSS

About This Blog

The Power Vertical is a blog written especially for Russia wonks and obsessive Kremlin watchers by Brian Whitmore. It covers emerging and developing trends in Russian politics, shining a spotlight on the high-stakes power struggles, machinations, and clashing interests that shape Kremlin policy today. Check out The Power Vertical Facebook page or Follow @PowerVertical

Did you know that your Internet Explorer is out of date?

Shqip

عربی

Հայերեն

Авар

Azərbaycanca

Нохчийн

BiH/Hrv/Srb/CG

Беларуская

دری

ქართული

English

Адыгэ

Қазақ

Kыргыз

Македонски

پشتو

فارسی

Românește

Тоҷикӣ

Татар

Turkmen

Українська

Ўзбекча

Русский

How to Listen

The Power Vertical

Zones

About This Blog

Other Russia Watchers

Most Recent Posts

Most Popular

Services:

Social Networks