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:

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

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

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

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:

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:

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

-- Robert Coalson

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 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

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

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":


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.


Let the games begin.

-- Brian Whitmore

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

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

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:
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.":


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:


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:


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

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:


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:
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:


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:
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

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:


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:


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

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:


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:


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

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:


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

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:


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:
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

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:


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:


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:
-- Brian Whitmore

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:


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

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:

1. The war in Abkhazia, in which Moscow-backed separatists battled Georgian forces began on August 14, 1992
2. The infamous MMM pyramid scheme collapsed in August 1994, depriving millions of Russians of their life savings 
3. A bomb exploded in the pedestrian underpass near the Pushkin Square metro station in downtown Moscow on August 8, 2000, killing 13 people 
4. The Russian nuclear submarine "Kursk" sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000, killing all 118 sailors on board 
5. On August 1, 2003, a suicide bomber attacked a military hospital in Mozdok, in North Ossetia, killing over 50 people 
6. 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

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:


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.


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:


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

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

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:


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.


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

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

So what's in the deal for the Kirill?


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

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:


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 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

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:
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:


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:


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:


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:


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


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

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):


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:


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


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

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:


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:


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:


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

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):


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

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):


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:


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:


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

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):


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:


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

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:


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:


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:


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

-- Brian Whitmore

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:


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:


The result, Ryabov says, is a vicious circle:


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

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:


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:


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

In a meeting on June 11 with heads of political parties not represented in the State Duma, President Dmitry Medvedev defended recent amendments to Russia's electoral law.

The modest changes make it slightly easier for small parties to win seats in the legislature. Medvedev told the leaders of Yabloko, Right Cause, and the Patriots of Russia that they are intended "to create a modern, more democratic political system in the country."

Perhaps Medvedev didn't get the memo.

Just a day earlier, the Public Projects Institute, a think tank with close ties to the ruling United Russia party, released a report saying that the last thing Russia needs is a more democratic system:


As if on cue, political consultant Gleb Pavlovsky -- who has close ties to Russia's de facto ruler and de jure Prime Minister Vladimir Putin -- chimed in with these comments after the report was presented:


Got that? Democracy -- bad. Modernization -- good. I was unaware the two were mutually exclusive.

And in case anybody missed the point, "Nezavisimaya gazeta" on June 10 published the latest in a series of broadsides in the Russian media against Igor Yurgens, chair of the Institute for Contemporary Development, a think tank with close ties to Medvedev.

Yurgens has raised eyebrows in recent months by suggesting in a series of interviews with Western media that Russia needs to open up its political system in order to emerge from the current economic crisis.

The authors, Dmitry Andreyev and Vadim Prozorov, defend Putin's system of governance and accuse Yurgens of seeking "the role of head strategist of the new Kremlin" by urging Medvedev to launch "a new perestroika" to "meet the basic parameters of the G-8 member countries."

This intellectual warfare among opposing camps of pundits, think tankers, and consultants has been going on for awhile now, as we have chronicled here, here, and here.

But the persistence of Putin loyalists and the siloviki clan in opposing even a modest thaw, and the fierceness of their assault on Yurgens, suggests that they are getting very very nervous.

-- Brian Whitmore

About a month ago I wrote a post about the dueling polling agencies in Russia and discussed briefly the relations between the All-Russian Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) and the Kremlin (particularly with the office of the Kremlin’s domestic-politics curator Vladislav Surkov and with the United Russia party).

 

That post prompted a query from a reader of the blog that made me think that the subject deserved a little more attention. Joera Mulders, writing from Amsterdam, asked the following:

 

You write about a " ... network of purportedly independent political parties, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and the like that are brought to bear in many situations to press the Kremlin’s line or, at least, to blur the non-Kremlin lines.

 

Isn't it a lot simpler to acknowledge the uprise of a considerate group within civil society that supports the current form of government and the current division of property? Do you really believe Surkov is orchestrating all that by himself? I did check out the partner and clients page at the VTsIOM side. Besides United Russia other 'organisations we cooperate with' are mentioned. NATO amongst others. Do you have other proof that VTsIOM is controled by UR or the Kremlin?

 

First, I do think that Surkov is orchestrating such a network and has been doing it for years now. Of course, he is not doing it “by himself.” Within the presidential administration, Surkov heads something called the “Main Department of Domestic Politics” (Glavnoye upravleniye vnutrennei politki), which was created in 2000 and in March 2004 (following United Russia’s successful showing in the December 2003 presidential election and just 10 days after Vladimir Putin’s reelection to the presidency) was elevated to the status of an “independent subunit” of the presidential administration.

 

It is a pretty secretive “subunit,” so there is no telling how many people Surkov has working under him there, but even its bland description on the Kremlin’s webpage is a little unnerving: “Within the areas of its competency it develops and presents to the president and the head of the presidential administration materials about the sociopolitical situation in the country, as well as proposals about matters relating to the state structure, federal relations, local self-government, and regional and informational policies.”

 

It oversees the relations between the Kremlin and “the Federal Assembly, organs of state government, organs of local self-government, political parties, professional and creative unions, business organizations, commerce chambers, social and religious organizations, and other civil-society structures.”

 

It oversees the president’s relations with the presidential envoys to the seven federal districts, which means that it has powerful mechanisms for implementing its policies on the local level across the country.

 

It isn’t easy to figure out all the threads of the “network of purportedly independent political parties, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and the like” that this office oversees, but I can say that I stumble across new ones all the time. In the run-up to the Georgian war last August and in its wake, numerous “Russian-Caucasian friendship societies” popped up to spread the Kremlin’s take on events in the Caucasus, to take one example.

 

There are other examples in the information sphere. Last December I wrote a post about some mysterious English-language websites that were publishing pro-Kremlin “information” and a man named “Vladimir” who was working out of the Russian Embassy in Washington and offering U.S. journalists money to reprint their materials. Some great reader comments to that post offered up links to other, equally suspicious websites.

“Foreign Policy” this week posted a nice little piece about a Kremlin 2.0 project called liberty.ru, a project of Kremlin-connect spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky that is intended “to make the Kremlin’s increasingly unappealing ideological package relevant to the younger generations.” (And speaking of Georgia, when I opened liberty.ru today they were featuring on the homepage a nice little video called “The Battle for History: Georgia 1989” that blames the anti-Soviet uprising in Tbilisi in 1989 on the CIA.)

 

Returning to Joera’s questions, I do feel that VTsIOM is a crucial part of this network and a look at the list of organizations for which VTsIOM conducts research gives some indication at how effective it is in distributing the Kremlin’s views on what public opinion in Russia is. In part, it is responsible for what I called in an earlier post, “the myth of Putin’s popularity” and, the other side of the same coin, the myth of the fecklessness of the anti-Putin opposition, including former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

 

The telling part of the list of partner organizations on the VTsIOM site comes when you scroll all the way down to the bottom and get to the real “partner organizations.” These include, in order, the presidential administration, the Health and Social Development Ministry, the Interior Ministry, the sociology center of the Defense Ministry, and the United Russia party.

 

Further down the list you will find Kremlin-friendly political consultant Stanislav Belkovsky's National Strategy Council (famous for “predicting” the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky) and Pavlovsky projects such as the Effective Politics Foundation (its site is under reconstruction), and the “experts network” kreml.org. Another partner is the Center for Political Forecasting, which is headed by Aleksei Chesnakov – who until last June was deputy head of – you guessed it! – the Main Department of Domestic Politics of the presidential administration (the department is headed by Oleg Govorun, a colorful character in his own right, but we don’t have time to pursue that thread of the network just now).

 

How does Chesnakov’s name fit into this picture? In preparing a response to Joera’s message, I dug through my VTsIOM files and came across the most thorough look at the polling agency, a November 2007 expose published in “Novoye vremya” by Moldovan investigative journalist Natalya Morar (you may remember her because she was not allowed into Russia because she purportedly presents a national security threat to Russia and because of the role she played in the April political unrest in Moldova).

 

Morar’s piece makes excellent reading and begins to expose both the ties between VTsIOM and the presidential administration and the shady scheme of offshore companies VTsIOM uses to hide its financial dealings.

 

Morar writes: “Deputy head of the Department of Domestic Politics of the presidential administration Aleksei Chesnakov personally oversees the work of the sociologists. According to a VTsIOM employee, center director Valery Fyodorov personally goes over all survey questions with Chesnakov for the weekly national express polls of public opinion. Every Friday, the presidential administration approves all the VTsIOM press releases that are being prepared for issue the following week.”

 

After discussing the surveys for a bit, Morar goes on to begin unraveling the research center’s financial structure, which involves at least two offshore companies – one registered in Cyprus and one in the British Virgin Islands. An independent financial analyst who studied the documents Morar secured said: “The purpose is obvious – avoiding taxes and shipping capital out of the country.” One might add that another purpose is to prevent outsiders from knowing how much money is going through the organization to keep them, for example, from seeing how it spikes during the election cycle. (Morar has said that the roots of the accusations that she presents a “national security threat” to Russia stem from her various investigations into the offshore financial manipulations of the ruling elite.)

 

Another VTsIOM employee (speaking anonymously, of course) said: “They pay us for our loyalty by giving us the chance to steal. They let us sit on certain money streams and don’t watch what we do with them. It is a classic example of bureaucratic kickback: using a state organization to draw in money that ends up in the pockets of bureaucrats. We are allowed to earn whatever we want as long as we meet all their conditions…. In general, I think that today’s VTsIOM is not a research organization. It was not created for this. It is part of a propaganda machine.”

 

Anyway, Joera, thanks a lot for reading and for writing. Your message set me off on a really interesting voyage of discovery.

 

-- Robert Coalson

Stratfor this week published a little paper called “The Geography of Recession” that is worth taking a look at, if only to be reminded of the old axiom that “geography is destiny.”

 

The report begins with statistics showing how the global recession is affecting various countries and then moves on to an interesting, geography-based explanation of why the recession is, so far, more than four times worse in Russia (change in GDP of negative 9.5 percent over the last 12 months) than it is in the United States (a decline of 2.6 percent).

 

Stratfor’s analysis of the United States – how its geography, including the world’s largest mass of arable land and a generous inland waterway system that promotes open and cheap domestic trade, produced a resilient and flexible political and economic system – is intriguing reading.

 

But Power Vertical readers are going to be most interested in the Russia section, which provides a neat summary of the Kremlin’s geographical and historical issues. And that section boils down to this, in Stratfor’s words: “If in economic terms the United States has everything going for it geographically, then Russia is just the opposite.” That is, a harsh climate, masses of barely inhabitable land, a disconnected river system that freezes for much of the year, a lamentable lack of warm-water ports, and no meaningful geographic borders separating it from its neighbors.

 

As a result, Russia’s historic national strategies have been predetermined: “Because Russia lacks a decent internal transport network that can rapidly move armies from place to place, geography forces Russia to defend itself following two strategies. First, it requires massive standing armies on all of its borders. Second, it dictates that Russia continually push its boundaries outward to buffer its core against external threats.”

 

The standing armies are a constant drain on the economy and the expansion strategy means “large populations that do not wish to be part of the Russian state and so must constantly be policed.” The lack of labor and capital needed to cope with the needs of the vast territory, Stratfor reminds us, impels Russia toward centralized planning in an effort to harness the limited resources available “to achieve even a modicum of security and stability.”

 

This, in turn, historically drives Russia toward systems having small ruling elites, an impulse that has been pushed to an extreme in the era of Vladimir Putin. The small elite means a shortage of attention and innovation, meaning that “unless management is perfect in perception and execution, any mistakes are quickly magnified into national catastrophes.”

The Stratfor conclusion, then, is: “It is therefore no surprise to STRATFOR that the Russian economy has now fallen the furthest of any major economy during the current recession.”

-- Robert Coalson

“Novaya gazeta” this week reported the surprising information that on April 13 the son of Rosneft Vice President Mikhail Stavsky (also named Mikhail) was kidnapped. According to some information, the kidnappers are seeking 50 million euros in ransom, while other sources say no demands have been made in the nearly two months since the abduction.

 

As the newspaper reports, kidnappings among the Russian business elite have been booming in recent years, almost approaching the levels seen in the lawless days of the 1990s. The paper lists nearly a dozen cases since 2005.

 

But the Stavsky case is shocking because Rosneft is controlled by Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the shadowy figure usually portrayed as being at the dark heart of Russia’s secret-services-based kleptocracy. Stavsky, being a senior member of Sechin’s team, is about as close to the center of power as one can get. If he is vulnerable, what does that mean? As “Novaya gazeta” writes, “either the criminals have once and for all lost any sense of fear, or they have such highly placed protectors that they feel they can go after the senior managers of the largest Russian companies.” A former Federal Security Service source told the newspaper that the person who ordered this kidnapping “fears nothing and has total confidence in his power.”

 

The fact that two months have passed without a resolution to the crisis would also indicate that Sechin’s hands are tied. Commentator and analyst Yulya Latynina has a nice piece arguing that the growing lawlessness in Russia is a sign that there is no such thing as a "power vertical." Maybe it is time to rename this blog?

 

The paper also reports that, according to its investigations, nine such cases out of 10 are carried out by former and active agents of the state security organs – the FSB, the Interior Ministry, the Defense Ministry, and so on. “And not just ordinary operatives,” the paper writes. “As a rule, these people are perfectly informed about every step being taken by investigators and in their telephone conversations they refer to investigators and agents working on the cases by name. In addition, they have modern special technology for eavesdropping and access to police databases containing confidential information about their victims and their families.”

 

The same issue of “Novaya gazeta” reports on another way corrupt elements in the secret services skim off the top – the establishment of “charitable funds” and nongovernmental organizations to support, you guessed it!, the secret services. The paper reports about 20 such organizations are registered in Moscow alone and that state companies (including major ones like Sechin’s Rosneft or Gazprom) are among their major supporters. Of course, Russian law does not force state companies to reveal how much of their money goes to support such “charitable” work, but minority-shareholders representative Aleksei Navalny is pushing to force them to open their books. (Navalny's blog.)

 

He is not only concerned about how much money these companies are spending in this way, but also about the likelihood that such donations are given in exchange for officials turning a blind eye to other, much grander corruption within the companies’ finances.

 

Interestingly, one of the charitable funds discussed in the “Novaya gazeta” report is devoted to arranging exotic hunting trips for members in Siberia and Altai, regions where officials in recent months have been caught up in outrageous poaching scandals involving slaughtering endangered animals from helicopters with high-powered rifles.

 

The “Novaya gazeta” investigation makes interesting reading. Although everyone is closed-mouthed about these funds, what they do, and how they are financed, the report traces circumstantial associations between people involved in them and companies such as Germany’s Ruhrgas (involved in a lucrative little energy deal in Sochi connected with the 2014 Winter Olympics) and individuals such as notorious arms merchant Viktor But.  

 

-- Robert Coalson

The Russian Front is a terrific blog for history buffs. And with Russian (and Soviet) history very much in the news these days, I thought it was worth a fresh look.

I wasn't disappointed.

In a series of succinct and spot-on posts about Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's newly created "Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of Russia," frontovki member DStone raises all the right issues and asks all the right questions.

The commission's composition, for example, is the first thing that should raise eyebrows:


Indeed, of the 28 members on the commission, DStone notes that there are only three people who can really be called historians (two researchers and an archivist). The other 25 members are bureaucrats and politicians.

The blog also takes Medvedev to task for his lack of specifics:


And if the Kremlin leader really wants everybody to have an accurate historical record, DStone has a novel idea:


Indeed, the commission's chair, Kremlin Chief of Staff Sergei Naryshkin, also happens to head the agency in charge of declassifying archived materials!

Finally, the blog notes Medvedev's alarming use of Stalin-era language:


In a recent column in "The Moscow Times," opposition politician and former State Duma deputy Vladimir Ryzhkov takes this Stalinist meme a step farther in discussing the possible motives for the commission:


Ryzhkov points out that "the irony in this farce is that the worst falsifiers of history by far have been Russian and Soviet authorities," adding that Medvedev's commission "creates a direct threat to historians and ordinary citizens trying to research the history of the war objectively."

And that would appear to be the point of the whole exercise.

-- Brian Whitmore

It certainly won’t come as news to Power Vertical readers that the electoral system in Russia is a rigged sham. We can’t say it any better than former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (thanks to La Russophobe for the citation), who said on May 21: “The electoral system has been revised to serve the interests of a single party, the interests of those who are now at the helm. Step by step, we have been going back to the past.”

 

But maintaining the kind of monolithic hold on power that United Russia has established isn’t always easy. President Dmitry Medvedev has been trying, for instance, to expand the political elite, to bring in fresh faces brimming with initiative. Some of these fresh faces don’t like the way the political game is played in Russia and a few have been willing to say enough is enough.

 

For instance, Anton Chumachenko was a Unified Russia candidate for a district board in St. Petersburg who resigned his mandate after he learned his election had been falsified (we wrote about it here and here). A St. Petersburg court on May 19 awarded his seat to the Yabloko candidate, “Novaya gazeta” columnist Boris Vishnevsky (Yabloko is solidly supported in the relatively liberal St. Petersburg, so the authorities there have been merciless in disqualifying them and otherwise preventing them from sharing in local government).

 

And that brings us to a quotation that is interesting to compare with Gorbachev’s remark. “In this case, we saw something that is rarely seen in Russia in recent years – a legal and just court,” Vishnevsky told his newspaper. “Could it be that something in this country and in our city is changing? I’d like to thank my supporters, who attended every session of the court. I’d also like to thank Anton Chumachenko, who not only went public about the falsification of the election in the Morskoi district, writing an open letter about it to voters, but who also supported my assertions during the trial…. Not many people believed that we could win in court. This is a very important precedent: there have been cases when the results of elections have been overturned, but this is the first time the new results have been to the advantage of a member of the opposition.”

 

The same court this week began hearing a second case involving falsification in the Morskoi district, in which Yabloko candidate Tatyana Sharagina hopes to win another seat for her party.

 

Of course, there is no news in Russia that is completely good. True, the local election commission (normally a loyal lapdog of United Russia and the powers that be) has said it will not appeal the court’s ruling. “Truth prevailed,” one commission member said! But she added that the falsification was due to the “inexperience” of polling-station officials; i.e., she will not concede there is a systemic problem. Also, no one apparently is being held criminally responsible for the falsification, a move that would send a clear signal through the system if, as Vishnevsky hopes, “something in this country and in our city is changing.”

 

But maybe this signal came in Saratov. The following day, May 20, a court there found a district polling-station official, Svetlana Minayeva, guilty of election fraud and sentenced her to pay a 200,000 ruble fine. The court ruled Minayeva had rewritten the polling-station protocol and falsified 300 votes in favor of the Unified Russia candidate for a city council position. The results of that election were already overturned by an earlier court decision. I wonder if some intrepid journalist in Saratov will look into whether United Russia pays Minayeva’s fine….

 

Meanwhile, a court in Tuva has opened a criminal case involving alleged election fraud in a local executive-branch race. That decision comes after the court nullified the election there following a recount in which it was found that 324 of the 1,035 votes officially awarded to the winner had been falsified. The court gave the post to the second-place candidate, Diinmei Balban-ool, on the basis of the recount. Initial media reports that I’ve seen did not identify the party affiliations of the candidates, but I’m guessing the original winner, Aldyn-ool Tyulyush, was part of the vertical.

 

And there are other signs of restlessness in the bottom ranks of the power vertical. “Kommersant” reported today that businessman Aleksandr Temnyshev has resigned from United Russia and will run as an independent candidate for mayor of Petrozavodsk in Karelia. Temnyshev is unhappy with the closed-door way the local party branch selects candidates for such posts, saying the party has become the equivalent of the stagnation-era Communist Party of the Soviet Union and is holding onto power solely by its command of “administrative resources” and the influence of Moscow.

 

The local leader of the Kremlin-friendly right-leaning Right Cause party said his party will back Temnyshev in the June 5 vote and lead a local anti-United Russia coalition. Like the mayoral election in Murmansk earlier this year, the Petrozavodsk race could be worth keeping an eye on.

 

In Ulyanovsk Oblast, a public initiative is under way to remove regional legislator (United Russia!) Sergei Glebov. It was revealed that Glebov claimed a false degree in ecology in his election-registration documents. Prosecutors ruled that the lie did not influence the outcome of the voting, so residents have begun a recall initiative. Aleksandr Fadeyev, who ran against Glebov and is organizing the recall drive, told RFE/RL’s Russian Service that it will be successful, unless the authorities interfere. “The one big ‘but’ in all this is whether the authorities will exert their influence, find ways of applying pressure that will enable him to avoid taking responsibility,” Fadeyev said. “The whole problem is how strongly will the authorities oppose us.”

 

According to the RFE/RL report, signs promoting the recall have been systematically taken down across the city as soon as they are posted and at least one person who was posting them was assaulted and had his flyers stolen. Ulyanovsk municipal authorities refused to allow the recall group to hold an organizing meeting in any public building – it was held on the steps of the local Dom Kultury instead (the building was empty at the time).

 

The recall effort must now secure official registration and then collect 2,000 signatures to force a recall vote. That vote must draw at least 40 percent of registered voters in order to be valid and a majority of them must support the effort for Glebov to be removed. There are plenty of opportunities for the authorities to throw wrenches in the works.

 

So, are these tiny signs that a new wind is blowing in Russia, that President Medvedev and his supporters are tired and ashamed of rigged elections, such as the ones that brought them to power? Could they be trying to change things in a stealthy way, at the bottom, where nobody is watching?

 

It’s hard to say. Certainly, if these are the fabled green shoots of a liberal spring, they are so miniscule that you need a magnifying glass to find them. They can’t compare with the gross falsification that we saw in the high-profile mayoral race in Sochi, which clearly sent very different signals through the political system.

 

-- Robert Coalson

The little village of Yeruda, nearly 750 kilometers from Krasnoyarsk, has a new resident. Russia’s richest man, oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, the sole owner of the Oneksim group of companies, has been officially registered in this village of 2,300 people.

 

As a result, Prokhorov will be paying his considerable personal profit taxes – estimated by polit.ru as 16 billion rubles ($515 million) this year -- into the regional budget. The 44-year-old bachelor is worth an estimated $14.1 billion, according to “Finans” magazine in February.

 

The billionaire’s contribution to the Krasnoyarsk krai budget should be enough nearly to cover half of the resource-rich region’s current budget deficit. Hopefully some of the money will trickle back down to Yeruda, which is noted mostly for being largely inaccessible most of the year because of a lack of paved roads (note to Prokhorov: bring your helicopter).

 

“Nezavisimaya gazeta” reported that it is hoped Prokhorov’s action will set an example for Krasnoyarsk Krai Governor Aleksandr Khloponin. Khloponin, a former CEO of Norilsk Nickel who is close to Prokhorov, is one of Russia’s richest governors, reporting a 2008 income of 635 million rubles in his recently filed assets declaration. His wife reported an income of 147 million rubles. Between them, they declared five luxury automobiles and considerable real estate, including parcels in Italy. Khloponin, though, is registered in Moscow.

 

While the move makes for good PR, Prokhorov doesn't particularly need any these days. “Vedomosti” might be on to the real reasoning behind the oligarch's gesture: “Of course, none of this could have happened without a request from the region, said one businessman who knows Prokhorov and the regional administration. It would be interesting to know what Prokhorov asked for in exchange.”

 

-- Robert Coalson

Igor Yurgens Western media tour continues.

In an interview with Reuters published on Wednesday, Yurgens compared President Dmitry Medvedev's tepid gestures toward reform to the limited thaw pursued by Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev.

"The tendency is very cautious, very weak," Yurgens,  head of the Institute for Contemporary Development and an adviser to Medvedev, said. "At the moment they are afraid of themselves. But the steps are in the right direction."
  
Yurgens also warned that the financial crisis has temporarily strengthened the hands of hardliners opposed to any liberalization, but warned that this would turn out to be a "Pyrrhic victory" because it will only cause the economic meltdown to deepen:

"Then there is only one way to go and ask the big Chinese brother to take us on board. And the cost of this will be enormously higher than the cost of the same operation with the EU and the United States."

The comments came just a day after Yurgens, in an interview with Britain's "Daily Telegraph," criticized Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Medvedev's political mentor and patron, for creating an overly centralized political system that stifles reform.

What to make of this persistent drumbeat of commentary from Yurgens and others -- much of which is being disseminated through the Western media -- calling for greater liberalization?

A May 19 editorial in Gazeta.ru called the trend -- like Medvedev's recent moves -- a " play at words, symbols, and gestures" that for the time being constituted little more than a "Kremlin palace game" that allows Medvedev "not to vanish altogether in Putin's shadow."

But the editorial noted that a time of reckoning could soon be on the horizon:


If this analysis is correct then the existence or non-existence of a split in the Putin-Medvedev leadership tandem may be irrelevant. Objective economic conditions, to borrow a Marxist phrase, could be pushing their respective teams and the entire political system toward a decisive showdown.

-- Brian Whitmore

Forty years ago today, on May 20, 1969, the human rights movement in the Soviet Union took a bold step forward. A group of 15 brave individuals – scholars, writers, historians – announced the formation of the Initiative Group for Human Rights in the USSR and sent an open letter to the UN Human Rights Commission. Eleven of the 15 were eventually arrested and imprisoned.

 

RFE/RL’s Russian Service attended a commemorative event at the Moscow headquarters of Memorial and spoke to some of the original members of the initiative group. Veteran activist Aleksandr Lavut, who worked for years on the dissident journal “The Chronicle of Current Events,” described the persecution he endured: “They hunted us, and viciously. We were constantly being watched and listened to. In later years, they followed us constantly, walked behind us, sometimes hiding and sometimes purposely not hiding. My apartment was only searched twice – the second time was when they came for me.”

 

Lavut was asked how his fellow Soviet citizens viewed his quixotic efforts and he said: “The people we knew, of course, sympathized. But we also heard reproaches like, ‘why are you beating your head against a wall? You should think about your family.’”

 

This attitude, Lavut says, has only changed a little. “People treat us with a certain respect and sympathy, but far from all. A lot of people think we aren’t needed and are even harmful. But for the most part, people approve of this work.”

 

Lavut says the social and political rights of Russians are constantly violated. “You might as well say that elections have almost disappeared,” he said.

 

Sergei Kovalyov, a tireless rights advocate who was also one of the original 15 members of the initiative group, is pleased that many more people (he says the Russian branch of Memorial has up to 10,000 members) are involved in rights work. But he says the obstacles presented by the government remain chillingly the same.

 

“It boils down to the right to have your own point of view, to be respected and not persecuted,” he said. “For example, it has been reported that President Medvedev has created a commission that is supposed to fight against falsifications of history that harm Russia’s prestige. It is clear that this is just another censorship organ. And a law is being prepared and will not doubt be passed by this Duma (which can in no sense be called a parliament) about the criminalization of such falsifications of history. This is tantamount to a ban on critical statements about World War II. For example, it will be forbidden to compare Stalin to Hitler, although I would say that Hitler is just a pale imitator of Lenin and Stalin. In short, today we are seeing an organized, systematic assault on freedom of thought.”

 

-- Robert Coalson

Igor Yurgens is at it again.

Back in February, the senior adviser to President Dmitry Medvedev rattled the Moscow political elite when he told the "New York Times" that Russia's implicit social contract -- in which citizens sacrificed political freedoms in exchange for rising living standards -- was being rendered null and void by the deepening economic crisis. Political liberalization, he said, was necessary if Russia was to emerge from the deepening recession.

Defenders of the current system wasted no time pushing back. Deputy Kremlin Chief of Staff Vladislav Surkov, the regime's unofficial ideologist, ridiculed Yurgen's comments and insisted that "the system is working."

Gleb Pavlovsky, a pro-Kremlin analyst who heads the Effective Politics Foundation, went as far as to suggest that comments likeYurgen's were an indication that a small "pro-crisis party" is lurking inside the Russian elite and might be plotting "a new little coup.

Apparently the push back has not deterred Yurgens.

In an interview with Britain's "Daily Telegraph" published today, Yurgens took aim at the authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy," saying it was holding back Russia's development: 


Other officials have echoed Yurgen's views in recent months, including Arkady Dvorkovich, the head of the Kremlin's experts directorate.

The ongoing public debate has naturally raised questions about whether Medvedev is trying to break free from the influence of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, Russia's de facto ruler and the president's political mentor and patron. Those speaking out against the current system, after all, tend to be close to Medvedev, while those defending it are almost always members of Putin's inner circle.

Political scientist Yuri Chernyshov told Newsweek's Russian-language edition (the article was translated and re-printed in the English-language magazine as well) that "Medvedev was a puppet, but now he seems to be doing things that may not please Putin."

The question of whether or not there is a split between Putin and Medvedev has been the source of endless speculation on this blog and elsewhere. But what is becoming very clear is that there is a growing chasm between their respective teams.

Citing unidentified officials, Newsweek also reported that normal channels of bureaucratic communications between Medvedev's Kremlin and Putin's government have all but stalled:


In his "Daily Telegraph" interview, Yurgens says it is clear to him that a battle is going on among the top strata of the elite, but that its true contours remain largely hidden. "There is a struggle under way, although it is not very clear what is going on," he said. "In a society that was more transparent, which had more democratic mechanisms and a viable opposition, we would have a better idea of what is going on."

-- Brian Whitmore

We pretend to work -- and they actually pay us!

For the past decade, Russia's emerging "middle class" got a pretty good deal. The Kremlin was determined to create a stable and sizable cohort of happy, well-fed, and status-conscious consumers who would provide the regime with bedrock political support -- or at least tacit acquiescence.

They drove cool cars, sported the latest fashions, played with trendy gadgets, and ate in fancy restaurants. All the things that were reserved for the oligarchic class and their hangers on throughout the 1990s were suddenly available to an emerging bourgeois.  Russia's magical new middle class had arrived.

And how did this new class earn the income to support their lifestyle? Well, there's the rub. The whole thing was a mirage, subsidized by the state and Kremlin-connected corporations with the help of a seemingly endless flow of petrodollars.

And now that is all at risk.

I recently spoke to Boris Kagarlitsky, director of the Institute for Globalization and Social Movements, who described the arrangement as a twist on the cynical old Soviet saying describing the social contract under Communism: 'We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.'


Nice work, if you can get it. And as the economic crisis continues, fewer and fewer people will be able to get it. And that, says Kagarlitsky, is when the trouble will really start for the regime:


In his 1969 samizdat text "Will The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?" the dissident writer Andrey Amalrik wrote that Soviet society was divided into three classes: a ruling "bureaucratic upper stratum" that was "rotting and incapable of government-level creativity"; a "middle stratum" of professionals and intellectuals that was cautious, passive, and fearful of losing its limited privilege; and a lower stratum made up of workers that was potentially "a destructive force."

Amalrik wrote that the system could only remain stable if the middle stratum grew. If it didn't, then the other two classes would drag the system down.

Sergey Shelin at "Gazeta.ru" and Paul Goble at his blog "Window on Eurasia" have both noted that this 40-year-old text also applies to present-day Russia. Here's Goble:


Members of Russia's prefab middle class have seen their living standards rise steadily over the past decade -- and expected those improvements to continue indefinitely. How will they react when it becomes clear to a critical mass that this will no longer be the case?

-- Brian Whitmore

After a three-week delay, President Dmitry Medvedev has signed off on Russia’s new National Security Strategy, a 20-page document that replaces the country’s 1997 National Security Concept, which itself was modified in 2000.

 

Medvedev first announced the need to replace the old concept with a new strategy following the war with Georgia last August. In March, the Security Council, headed by Nikolai Patrushev and charged with drafting the document, announced it had been completed. But on the very next day, Patrushev told journalists the council would take another month to “refine” the draft. According to media reports, the draft was approved at a council meeting on April 24 with Medvedev in attendance and has been awaiting his signature since.

 

When the one-month delay was announced, some analysts expected the draft would be modified to reflect the apparently warming relations between Russia and the West (the United States in particular) following mutual pledges to “reset” ties. However, gazeta.ru quoted sources involved in the drafting process as saying the changes primarily were motivated by the country’s economic crisis. Vyacheslav Senchagov, a member of the council’s research staff, told the website that specific performance benchmarks were removed from the draft in order to make it easier for the government to say it had achieved the document’s aims.

 

And, indeed, the document does not reflect any warming of Russia’s relations with the West. It states that a major threat to Russian security is “the policy of some foreign states aimed at attaining an overwhelming military superiority, particularly in the area of strategic nuclear weapons, through targeted, informational, and other high-technology means of conducting armed conflict, non-nuclear strategic arms, the development of missile defenses, and the militarization of space” (It is clear why Andrei Savelyov, head of the Great Russia party, commented that “in places the document is so ungrammatical and illogical that it makes the reader weep”).

 

Likewise, it deplores NATO’s efforts to “move the military infrastructure of the alliance to [Russia’s] borders and efforts to give it global functions, which contradict the norms of international law.” This would seem to call into question even NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan. The doctrine asserts that “the North Atlantic alliance, as well as flawed legal instruments and mechanisms, are increasingly creating threats to international security.” Dmitry Tymchuk, a Ukrainian military analyst, said the document amounts to declaring the disbanding of NATO as a strategic goal of Russia.

 

The document’s calls for a new international security architecture would, at best, reduce NATO to just a partner with Russia in establishing security in the north Atlantic region, just as the Kremlin, for instance, sees the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as the main vehicle for ensuring security in Central Asia. This would seem to be the essence of what the document means when it discusses “the transition from bloc-based confrontation to multi-vector diplomacy.”

 

The National Security Strategy, of course, discusses the need to improve the country’s democratic and political institutions and to do more to ensure the rights guaranteed by the constitution. Interestingly, it lists “the activity of terrorist organizations, groups, and individuals aimed at the violent alteration of the principles of the constitutional order of the Russian Federation and at the disruption of the normal functioning of the organs of state authority (including violent actions against state, political, and social figures)” among the security threats the country faces. Human rights activists will undoubtedly seize on this statement to demand more concerted state action in regard to incidents such as the shooting death of defense attorney Stanislav Markelov, assaults against opposition politicians, and the like.

 

However, the status of concerns about the rights of citizens and the state of democratic institutions is definitely downgraded in the current document. Viktor Litovkin, editor of the military supplement of “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” writes: “In comparison to the old National Security Concept, which spoke about the priority of the security of the individual, society, and the state, the new Strategy brings to the fore national defense and state and public security. Of course, it does not forget about human rights. But they are not discussed in the sort of systematic way that they were before.”

 

Unlike its predecessors, the new strategy document includes benchmarks by which, in theory, the government’s success can be measured. These include categories like the level of unemployment, the difference between the economic potential of the top and bottom tenths of the population, a consumer-price index, and the like. However, these categories are listed without any baseline or target figures. Gazeta.ru reported that such targets are included in a secret protocol to the public document.

 

The new National Security Strategy now -- together with other policy statements like the Strategy 2020 economic-development plan, Medvedev’s integration anticorruption plan, and the ongoing reform of the Russian military -- becomes part of the government’s planning framework. Although it has no legal force itself, it will play a guiding role as legislation is drafted, and the Security Council will meet regularly to monitor the benchmarks it sets out.

 

But it is a sweeping document covering an unpredictable decade. “Unfortunately, and this has already become a sad tradition for us, there is often a wide gap between ideas declared and confirmed by the authorities…and real life,” analyst Litovkin says. “It happens that conceptions, strategies and doctrines are things in themselves, for the libraries and archives, for doctoral dissertations and research projects, while public and state policies are completely separate.”

 

--Robert Coalson

 

 

 

 

The occasion of the first anniversary of Dmitry Medvedev’s inauguration has inspired a raft of good pieces on the way Russia’s two-headed leadership is functioning. One of the most readable and comprehensive comes from veteran political scientist Peter Reddaway and can be found here.

 

Reddaway argues that the tandem structure was an ungainly beast from the beginning and that the pressures of the economic crisis are making increasingly exposing its weaknesses. He summarizes some of the arguments on the tandem put forward by Gleb Pavlovsky (discussed on this blog here), particularly his claim that there is a “pro-crisis” party within the ruling elite that is interested in trying to “detach Medvedev from the tandem, get rid of Putin, declare Medvedev their hero and ride to power.”

 

When considering the extent to which Medvedev is a force within the tandem instead of, as many still suppose, just carrying water for the dominant Putin, analysts often get stuck on the issue of what is the president’s base of support within the elite. It is generally accepted that Putin has salted his secret-service pals and St. Petersburg connections everywhere that counts. And who, even theoretically, would come to Medvedev’s aid if – and this is a huge if, I think – some sort of dispute developed between the president and the prime minister?

 

Some have suggested that Medvedev is building a power center within the legal community, based on the Association of Lawyers of Russia, which he heads. The association has experienced rapid national growth over the last year and is involved in drafting some of the initiatives that Medvedev has been discussing in the areas of combating corruption and legal reform.

 

Some point to the Institute of Contemporary Development (INSOR), a supposedly reformist think tank whose board of trustees Medvedev heads. Certainly, INSOR has been generating discussion and proposals, but there is no sign it has any particular influence or would be of any great use in an under-the-carpet catfight. (See earlier post.)

 

But in a series of excellent and provocative posts (three parts: here, here, and here), the illuminating The Russia Monitor blog makes the argument that Medvedev is developing a powerbase with teeth in the form of the Federal Bailiffs Service (FBS, not to be confused with the FSB). That law enforcement agency could play a muscular role if Medvedev’s anticorruption initiatives get off the ground. The Russia Monitor speculates that the anticorruption drive (in which there are, of course, roles for the other “power centers” mentioned above) could itself be “the necessary pretext to consolidate [Medvedev’s] power.”

 

The author goes out on a limb and predicts that this consolidation is part of Putin’s transition plan:

 

I think Putin will slowly drift into the background until one day we will notice he is gone. There will not be some cataclysmic clash between Medvedev and Putin, no arrests of one or the other. Why? Because Putin planned it this way. It might even have started back in 2007, in the aftermath of the Tri Kita scandal, when Viktor Cherkesov -- head of the Anti-Narcotics Service -- wrote an open letter in Kommersant to other siloviki urging them to not break out into open warfare amongst one another. The article probably only confirmed what Putin already knew - that if a silovik replaces him either (a) the country will fall apart and/or (b) he will end up as collateral damage. So Putin knew he had to go with Medvedev.

 

Of course, there is no way to tell, but the arguments presented in those posts seem well-reasoned and more logically consistent than anything else I’ve read on the topic. They may explain why Putin, who supposedly has all the levers of power, has tolerated various gestures Medvedev has made that he purportedly opposed, such as naming Nikita Belykh governor of Kirov Oblast, not firing a Far East police chief who supposedly was too soft on antigovernment demonstrators, and allowing Boris Nemtsov to run for mayor in Putin’s beloved Sochi.

 

Some will argue that Putin is still preparing to return to the presidency. Andrei Piontkovsky told RFE/RL this recently:
 

[Putin’s] huge mistake in this entire operation was taking on the post of prime minister, considering that traditionally in Russia the prime minister is responsible for the economy. In such a situation, holding elections last December or in March would have looked like he was deserting his post. So now he is waiting for even a very tiny glimmer of some positive tendencies [in the economy] so that he can, under some convenient pretext, triumphantly complete Operation Successor.
 

The Russia Monitor makes a good case that Putin is sincere about the transition. And he’s trying to carry it out before his own power centers realize it.

-- Robert Coalson

There has been a lot of analysis in recent months (even years) about the ways the ruling elite in Russia has bolstered its ideological infrastructure – that is, the network of purportedly independent political parties, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks, and the like that are brought to bear in many situations to press the Kremlin’s line or, at least, to blur the non-Kremlin lines.

 

Orchestrated by deputy presidential administration head Vladislav Surkov, this apparent network (it appears to be a horizontal arrangement, but is actually a key component of the power vertical) has proven very successful in containing political discussion and muting dissent. Analyst Nicu Popescu of the Center for European Policy Studies published a nice, three-page description of this network – both within Russia and within the CIS countries – in 2006 that is still worth reading closely.

 

Polling agencies make up an important part of this network, as a recent RFE/RL Russian Service story notes. The Goliath among Russian pollsters is the All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM), a quasi-state agency that is virtually a wing of the ruling United Russia party. The party is listed as the agency’s main partner organization and VTsIOM’s homepage includes “facts” such as that Russians support United Russia by a margin of 54 percent to the 7 percent of the second-place Communists. Likewise, it notes that party leader and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is the country’s most trusted politician (53 percent), followed by President Dmitry Medvedev (43 percent) and a few dwarves lagging back in single digits.

 

It also informs us that if a presidential election were held right now, Medvedev would win with 48 percent of the vote, followed by Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov, whose support has supposedly dwindled to just 6 percent. Interestingly, VTsIOM apparently decided it wasn’t worth including Putin among the list of possible candidates in its hypothetical presidential poll.

 

Our Russian Service’s report focused on two recent opinion polls that offered starkly different analyses of public opinion regarding the current economic crisis. One was issued by the Kremlin-friendly VTsIOM and the other by the independent Levada Center, which was founded in 2003 by sociologists who broke away from VTsIOM when they saw which way the wind was blowing.

 

The VTsIOM report on the crisis found that “the peak of [public] concern about the crisis came in February.” At time, 56 percent of respondents said they were “very worried” about the situation, compared to just 43 percent in April. The poll found that 66 percent of Russians say life has become harder, but the situation is bearable. “In my opinion,” VTsIOM General Director Valery Fyodorov told RFE/RL, “that is perhaps the most indicative figure showing that a process of adapting to the crisis is under way.”

 

Levada Center researcher Natalya Bondarenko says “the growth of pessimism” has slowed in Russia, but there is no increase in optimism about the crisis. Seventy percent of respondents in their study last month said they expect unemployment to grow. Twenty-one percent said they personally or a close relative had already lost a job in recent months.

 

Nikolai Petrov attributes the differences in interpretation (and dissemination of those interpretations) to VTsIOM’s pro-government leaning as opposed to the Levada Center’s independence. He told RFE/RL that recent local elections in Murmansk, Sochi, and elsewhere have shown that “increasingly often the power vertical is not working,” meaning that “the federal center has weakened and those mechanisms that ensured loyalty – primarily, large infusions of cash – don’t work anymore.”

 

“We are seeing a ‘thawing’ of society,” Petrov added. “At the same time, we are seeing a ‘thawing’ of the ruling elite. The appearance of a monolith is being maintained, but on closer inspection very serious and intensifying conflicts are visible.”

 

I’m not sure how much I agree with Petrov’s analysis, although I do think some sort of “thawing” is taking place (not a liberalization, but a kind of reorientation as factions within the ruling elite compete for a dwindling pool of resources). Perhaps what we have seen in recent local elections is an attempt (a possibly premature attempt) by Surkov to put the mechanics of rigging elections into the hands of United Russia directly.

 

He is surely smart enough to know the period between national elections is the ideal time for trying out new processes that could come in handy during the next national cycle. And he may yet be confident enough to think that he can devise mechanisms that will produce the same reliable national results as he achieved in 2007 and 2008, but without quite as many egregiously embarrassing lapses in the Kremlin’s official “we are marching toward democracy” narrative.

 

-- Robert Coalson

Whenever a major event in the life of Russia’s “managed democracy” takes place, I end up with a laundry list of moments that are weirdly disorienting, a dizzying combination of sad and funny at the same time. They bring to life the famous maxim associated with Nikolai Gogol about “laughter through tears” and show what a strange, “black-is-white” kind of place today’s Russia has become.

 

Of course, the mayoral election in Sochi (I hope people aren’t tired of reading about this yet) was no exception. Some of the items on my list are predictable and happen every time as if according to a script. For instance, there is a whole genre that could be called “Communists complaining about unfair elections.” Yury Dzagania, the Communist candidate who came in third in Sochi according to the official numbers, had this to say to RFE/RL’s Russian Service:

 

I must say that the election campaign was conducted in a completely unacceptable way, completely undemocratically. That is, it is evidence that the democratic foundations of our country have been brought to this kind of ‘perfection,’ that we have long ago been transformed into a totalitarian state.
 

You know things are bad when Russian communists are complaining about totalitarianism.

I'd include all the statements from local election officials about how the vote proceeded without violations in this category of predictable cognitive dissonance as well.
 

And there are also the inevitable statements that the media coverage of the campaign was fair and professional. One of my favorite examples involves an interview Russia Today, the state-run English-language television channel, did with United Russia’s Anatoly Pakhomov (Did RT interview Boris Nemtsov? I think I missed it).

“The Moscow Times” reported how RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, personally went down to Sochi to interview Pakhomov in a room that looked suspiciously like his office. Using his office for campaign purposes would have been illegal, so a Pakhomov spokesperson told the daily that 28 mock offices had been created by the campaign for campaigning purposes. None of them were actually shown to journalists. And Simoyan herself was interviewed by journalists immediately following the Pakhomov interview – in the lobby of Sochi City Hall.

 

Many newspaper stories in Sochi about the campaign featured only material about Pakhomov and ended with a scripted note to the effect that “no information was presented by the other candidates.” This is “laughter through tears” in so many ways: The papers seem to be confessing that the material they ran on Pakhomov was presented by his campaign; they also seem to be confessing that they don’t actually do reporting, thus impugning their own journalists.

 

RFE/RL’s Russian Service, however, had the opposite experience. All of the candidates were easily available except for Pakhomov, whose City Hall staff, campaign staff, and United Russia handlers all seemed to spend the entire campaign in an amateur game of phone tag.

 

Some of the other looking-glass moments surrounded the negative campaign waged against Boris Nemtsov. His campaign manager, Ilya Yashin, documented how Nemtsov confronted a group of pro-Kremlin youth activists who were parading posters with pictures of Nemtsov and despised former oligarch Boris Berezovsky (it is illegal in Russia to use someone’s photograph in campaign material without their written permission). They were claiming that Nemtsov’s national political career was engineered by Berezovsky, a charge that was repeated and elaborated in a slick 20-minute smear video that was run by all the local television channels.

 

In the confrontation, Nemtsov pointed out that if anyone’s national political career had been engineered by Berezovsky, it was Vladimir Putin’s. Berezovsky, of course, was part of the antidemocratic Kremlin cabal that greased Putin’s rise to power and ensured his election as successor to President Boris Yeltsin. He also was the brain behind the creation of the Unity party, which morphed into United Russia. One wonders if this information came as news to the activists holding the Berezovsky portraits.

 

The 20-minute smear film against Nemtsov, which featured Kremlin-connected analyst Gleb Pavlovsky and scandal-mongering journalist Sergei Dorenko, also accused Nemtsov of “hopping” from job to job in an opportunistic fashion. The film noted that he went from being governor of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in the mid-1990s, to deputy prime minister, to an official at a bank, to a leader of the Union of Rightist Forces political party. In all, these positions covered nearly a decade.

 

In the same years, Putin went from being first deputy chairman of the government of St. Petersburg in 1995 to being deputy head of the president’s office in 1996 to being deputy head of the presidential administration in 1997 to being first deputy head of the presidential administration in 1998 to being head of the Federal Security Service (also in 1998) to being prime minister in 1999 to being president in 2000. In fact, until he became president, Putin seems to have had considerable trouble holding down a job.

 

I’m sure there were a lot more looking-glass moments during the Sochi circus and its aftermath. If you have a favorite that I missed, please share it.

 

-- Robert Coalson

The dissection of the mayoral election in Sochi is proceeding vigorously, with some arguing that opposition candidate Boris Nemtsov’s insistence on running and his securing, by official numbers, nearly 14 percent of the vote in a rigged, antidemocratic process already amount to something of a victory for the opposition. Others are arguing that even participating in such farcical “elections” is a mistake that allows the ruling elite to continue acting as if some sort of democracy (albeit, “managed”) exists in Russia.

 

Leaving aside for a moment what the election means for Solidarity, there are conclusions to be drawn from the Kremlin’s point of view. First, the victory-producing machine is in perfect working order, with local officials, police, Kremlin-friendly activists and thugs, the courts, the media, the local election commission, and the Central Election Commission all working like gears in a well-engineered machine in a way that is as impressive as it is frightening.

 

That machine took a faceless bureaucrat who refused to campaign and produced a figure of 77 percent support that will no doubt withstand scrutiny all the way up through the Russian Supreme Court (what happens in Strasbourg is less certain, although it's a safe bet only our children or grandchildren will be around to find out).

Incidentally, Solidarity activist Garry Kasparov told RFE/RL’s Russian Service that the decision not to have United Russia candidate Anatoly Pakhomov appear in public during the campaign was a very smart one. Kasparov crossed paths with Pakhomov at a gathering to mark the World War I-era mass killings of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire and had this to say: “Having seen Pakhomov and having heard his short, confused speech, I understood why he was not allowed to step in front of a microphone in front of a large number of people, because this would have alienated even United Russia supporters.”

 

That lesson, of course, is nothing new. United Russia has been running stiffs for ages now and maintains its record as the only political party in Russia that has never participated in a campaign debate. (In fairness, there have been some media reports in recent weeks that Kremlin domestic-politics overseer Vladislav Surkov has been holding seminars among United Russia officials with the goal of teaching them how to speak in public; so far, though, this effort has borne no fruit and Surkov is almost certainly smart enough to realize quickly what a hopeless task it is). Its candidates have a tradition of disdaining contact with voters and maybe Kasparov has put his finger on why.

 

More importantly, the Sochi election has drawn the ruling elite's attention to two tactics that have certainly been tried before, but never on this scale and with such devastating effect -- turnout suppression and early voting. A near total local-media blackout on the election and other devices were used to make sure that as few voters as possible turned out to vote. Kasparov told RFE/RL that polling stations stopped playing music over the loudspeakers at about noon in order not to attract the attention of passersby. Election officials also closed down buffets and stopped the reduced-price sale of foodstuffs – a leftover from the Soviet days when voters had to be bribed to come to the polls -- by midday. In the end, turnout for this high-profile election was just 37 percent.

The success of the effort to suppress turnout made the tactic of early voting all the more important. In Sochi, at least 11 percent of all voters and more than 25 percent of those who actually voted were recorded as “early voters.” That figure is about 100 times greater than the average for Russian elections from 1996-2007, “Vedomosti” reported today. In addition, some 12 percent of voters voted from home, according to official figures. These were mostly the elderly and the handicapped.

 

And more than 90 percent of the “early voters” cast their ballots for Pakhomov. In short, the idea was to do everything possible to make sure that people who could be intimidated into voting for United Russia (by assuring them that their votes were not secret and that they would face consequences on the job if they voted “incorrectly”), while at the same time doing everything possible to make sure other voters did not come to the polls or even know about the election. This was the essence of the election that President Dmitry Medvedev lauded as a healthy indication of the state of Russian democracy.

 

The “Vedomosti” article is fascinating because the daily interviewed Central Election Commission member Yelena Dubrovina, who pointed out that the practice of early voting was sharply curtailed in 1996 because it was an antidemocratic practice that was subject to massive abuse. Dubrovina even acknowledged that the practice reduces public faith in the electoral system.

 

But the very next words out of her mouth are that the commission is now inclined to expand the practice for all elections! United Russia Duma Deputy Aleksandr Moskalets, deputy chairman of the Constitutional Law Committee, told the daily election law might well be amended to expand early voting before the next national Duma elections.

 

Testing this system prior to institutionalizing it nationally may ultimately have been the reason why Nemtsov was allowed to run in the first place. Nemtsov himself, speaking to RFE/RL, attributed that decision to the fact that “there was no agreement between Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev” on how to handle the Sochi election. That would imply that Medvedev overruled Putin, which seems like a stretch. More likely, Surkov convinced Putin that allowing Nemtsov into the race and then putting him in a box was the most “managed-democratic” way to go.

 

Mikhail Tulsky, head of the Political Analysis Foundation, told RFE/RL bluntly: “Among experts and analysts, early voting is a direct synonym for falsification.” No wonder Surkov likes it.

 

Strangely, Nikolai Petrov, of the Moscow Carnegie Center, views the shift from refusing to allow opposition candidates to run to mass falsification of the voting results as a positive thing. Speaking to “Nezavisimaya gazeta,” Petrov said: “It is no longer necessary to harshly eliminate from a campaign candidates who are inconvenient for the Kremlin. This experiment by the authorities has been carried out to the end: Nemtsov did not run against Pakhomov, but against the Kremlin. And the result that he ended up with turned out to be more than respectable. In this sense, the Kremlin, the opposition, and the public can all consider this election a sort of victory.”

 

Congratulations.

 

-- Robert Coalson

In St. Petersburg they called him the "Nighttime Governor," and the moniker fit.

Throughout the 1990s and for a good part of the current decade, Vladimir Barsukov appeared to be the true ruler of Russia's second city regardless of who was formally in power.

Officially he served since 1998 as vice president of the St. Petersburg Fuel Company. But Barsukov -- who was known as Vladimir Kumarin until he changed his name in the late 1990s just prior to that appointment -- derived his true power as the alleged leader of a highly feared and politically connected criminal gang called the "Tambovskaya gruppirovka" or the Tambov Gang.

By the late 1990s, the Tambov Gang reportedly held stakes in much of the St. Petersburg's petroleum, real estate, and banking sectors. They were also believed to control much of the commercial traffic from Russia's ports in St. Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk, and Murmansk.

In 1998, Barsukov denied the existence of the Tambov Gang, telling a Russian interviewer: "We don't conduct any meetings and we don't have membership payments."

Barsukov was arrested in August 2007 at his St. Petersburg home following a stealth operation by a special team of OMON riot police brought in from Moscow especially for the job. Local law enforcement was kept in the dark.

He has been accused of illegally seizing various properties and businesses in Russia's second city, forming a criminal gang, and organizing contract killings.

Barsukov's trial began earlier this month after being moved from St. Petersburg to Moscow, reportedly to protect the defendant's life.

Since Barsukov's arrest, various interpretations have circulated about why the Kremlin threw such a well-connected crime boss under the bus (and make no mistake, nobody as big as Barsukov takes a fall in Russia without a green light from the Kremlin).

Shortly after the arrest, St. Petersburg-based investigative journalist Andrei Konstantinov, who writes extensively on organized crime, told RFE/RL's Russian Service that the Kremlin sees Barsukov as a relic of a bygone era who needed to be removed:


Other reports speculated that Barsukov -- who had close ties to key figures in Vladimir Putin's Kremlin -- was a victim of the so-called "siloviki war" of 2007 between two clans of security service veterans in the former president's inner circle who were vying for power, influence, and access to state assets.

There has also been a fair amount of reporting over the years -- most of it in foreign media -- trying to unravel Barsukov's alleged ties to Putin himself during his tenure as St. Petersburg's deputy mayor in the 1990s.

Whatever the real reason for Barsukov's fall, his is certainty a trial to keep an eye on.

-- Brian Whitmore

While many in Russia's political elite see an emerging catastrophe in the economic crisis, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov sees an opportunity.

In an widely-circulated interview with "The Financial Times" last month, Shuvalov said the cash crunch resulting from falling oil prices gives Russia an opportunity to diversify its economy and escape its historically dangerous dependency on energy and commodities prices:
Shuvalov is backed by Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin and Economics Minister Elvira Nabiullina.

But he also has a very powerful -- and predictable -- opponent: Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, who is also chairman of the state oil giant Rosneft. Sechin argues against diversification, saying Russia's over-dependence on energy is a fiction dreamed up in the West.

Writing in "Novaya gazeta," Andrei Ryabov, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center, summarized the polemic as follows:


This debate is bound to heat up in the coming weeks as the economy continues to tank and in the aftermath of the austere budget that Kudrin has just presented.

But at the end of the day, this debate is as much about politics as it is about economics. As I have noted here and elsewhere, diversifying the economy implies a decentralization of economic power. This would inevitably lead to a devolution of political power, something Sechin and much of the current elite finds intolerable.

In a commentary in Gazeta.ru, political analysts Vladimir Milov succinctly explains why:


This is why the polemic over the economy is closely related to the ongoing dispute about the political system, in which a growing chorus is saying the crisis makes it necessary to liberalize the authoritarian system of "sovereign democracy" instituted by Vladimir Putin.

In the bureaucratic game, which security service veterans like Sechin know how to play better than anyone, Shuvalov doesn't stand a chance.

But the wild card in the deck of course is Russian society, which is getting fed up with the government's ineptitude in addressing the crisis and -- in some quarters -- seems to be showing signs of waking up from its long slumber.

-- Brian Whitmore