Reason Magazine - Topics > Russia

When I Hear the Word "Gorbachev," I Think, "Zombies! Zeppelins! Cleavage!"

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 16:12:00 EDT

Brush up on Russian history and the proper ways to slaughter the undead with the best music video ever.

the eXile in Exile

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:49:00 EDT

Here's Sean McMeekin writing in reason in 2001, in an article about the eXile, the irreverent muckraking Moscow tabloid founded by Matt Taibbi and Mark Ames:

Ames and Taibbi often remark that their paper would be shut down in a minute if it were published in New York or Washington, if not for unlawful slander then by armies of enraged feminists, anti-obscenity activists, and sexual harassment lawyers. In light of the heat generated by the eXile just among the expatriate community of Americans in Moscow--where the editors have repeatedly endured blackmail, petition drives to boycott the paper's advertisers, and even death threats--such a scenario is not hard to imagine.

In Moscow, by contrast, Ames and Taibbi are free to go on smearing rhetorical mud pies over the Clintonian New World Order. Fleeing the unwritten speech codes of their native America, Ames and Taibbi have found a First Amendment haven in the former capital city of International Communism, of all places.

That didn't last. The Russian government has just shut down the newspaper. More precisely, the authorites "audited" its editorial content, prompting the paper's weak-kneed investors to withdraw their funds. The eXile website is still online, though its future is also uncertain. "Looks like this Fifth Column is winning, and we'll be forced to retreat from Moscow," eXile columnist Gary Brecher writes. "Ya hear that, Moscow, ya ungrateful place? We're shakin' your dust from our 'Nam boots and setting up a new site somewhere not so allergic to truth, boobs and gory jokes. Maybe we can get Eritrea to give us a home."

Update: Good news -- the online edition isn't ready to die just yet. It plans to keep publishing from an "undisclosed Putin-proof location."

Putin Erases Dissent

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:00:00 EDT

And Russia gets a little scarier:

On a talk show last autumn, a prominent political analyst named Mikhail Delyagin offered some tart words about Vladimir Putin. When the program was televised, Delyagin was not.
His remarks were cut and he was digitally erased from the show, like a disgraced comrade airbrushed from an old Soviet photo. (The technicians may have worked a bit hastily; they left his disembodied legs in one shot.)
Delyagin, it turned out, has for some time resided on the so-called stop list, a roster of political opponents and other critics of the government who have been barred from television news and political talk shows by the Kremlin.

It May Shock You. It Might Even Horrify You.

info@reason.com (Damon W. Root) — Thu, 22 May 2008 09:45:00 EDT

Writing in yesterday's New York Sun, National Review ‘s Andrew Stuttaford surveys some of the carnage and perversity featured in the intriguing new book Lenin's Brain and Other Tales from the Soviet Archives. From Stuttaford's review:

The saga begins with the removal of [Lenin's] brain in the immediate aftermath of its owner's death, to be poked and prodded, examined and venerated. From there it went on a long, strange trip from skull to jar to slide, ending up divided into 30,953 carefully selected slices. (I am unclear whether this total includes the portion that was dispatched to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.) A German brain specialist was put in charge of the project for a while, but he proved unacceptably foreign and irritatingly independent. In the end, however, Stalin's Politburo got the result it wanted from a team of more biddable experts, "proof" that Lenin was smarter than just about anybody else—a mixture of pseudoscience and elitism that was all too typical of the Bolshevik project. As the episode reminds us, the Soviet leadership believed that the masses were inherently unreliable: Without an "enlightened elite to manage [them], there would never be a peasant-worker paradise. By this logic, the creators of this dictatorship must themselves be head and shoulders above the rest."

Whole thing here.

The Soviet horror show that particularly sticks in my brain is described in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The scene is a district Party conference in Moscow Province. Stalin wasn't there, but of course he was celebrated at the close of proceedings. The applause was thunderous.

However, who would dare be the first to stop? The secretary of the District Party Committee could have done it. He was standing on the platform, and it was he who had just called for the ovation. But he was a newcomer. He had taken the place of a man who'd been arrested. He was afraid! After all, NKVD men were standing in the hall applauding and watching to see who quit first. And in that obscure, small hall, unknown to the Leader, the applause went on—six, seven, eight minutes! They were done for! Their goose was cooked! They couldn't stop now till they collapsed with heart attacks. At the rear of the hall, which was crowded, they could of course cheat a bit, clap less frequently, less vigorously, not so eagerly—but up there with the presidium where everyone could see them?

D.I.Y. Eminent Domain

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:12:00 EDT

RIA Novosti reports:

A villager in south Russia's Astrakhan Region has been detained on suspicion of stealing his neighbor's house, which is common practice in remote areas, a local police spokesman said Monday.

The spokesman said the hapless house owner, who had been away for four months, reported the theft to police after he returned home to find his house gone and just the foundations remaining.

"A local resident decided that if no one was living in the house, it could be taken away piece by piece, and he dismantled it for construction materials and put them inside his yard," the police spokesman said, adding the suspect faced a maximum of three years in prison, if found guilty.

Meet the New Czar

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 17:15:00 EDT

A popular Soviet joke once asked when would the first Soviet-style election take place? Answer: When God brought Eve before Adam and said, "Choose your wife." For the Russian presidential election of March 2, 2008, this could be updated to a "democratic" scenario in which Adam's choices also include two monkeys and a blow-up doll.

That the "election" was a fixed game was clear from the start, when Dmitry Medvedev's "nomination" by the dominant United Russia Party and three small pro-government parties served as a façade for his selection as Vladimir Putin's heir. The last fig leaf of legitimacy was tossed aside when former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov, the only serious candidate of the liberal opposition, was disqualified from running, supposedly due to a high rate of invalid signatures on his petitions.

Adding to the farce, an obscure "liberal" candidate—38-year-old Andrei Bogdanov, a self-styled Freemason and head of the tiny Democratic Party of Russia—did get on the ballot. Widely viewed as a Kremlin puppet, Bogdanov was the blow-up doll to the campaign's two monkeys: "Liberal Democratic Party of Russia" leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, whose infamous antics include public fisticuffs with other politicians and pledges to help raise the birth rate by personally fathering children around the country, and Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov. Several Medvedev-less televised debates supplied their moments of pseudo-political circus, such as Zhirinovsky verbally abusing Bogdanov spokesman Nikolai Gotsa, then punching him on their way off the set and telling a bodyguard to "take him outside and shoot him." The Medvedev campaign, meanwhile, consisted of aggressive, often coercive efforts to boost voter turnout. (Eventually, official reports put turnout at 67 percent, with Medvedev getting 70 percent of the vote.)

A number of pundits, both in Russia and in the West, have argued that the rigged vote was still a genuine and rational people's choice—a choice to continue the Putin course that brought stability and relative prosperity to the country. That the choice was "genuine," if influenced by pervasive misinformation, is probably true. "Rational" is another matter. Writing in Foreign Affairs, Stanford University professors Michael McFaul and Kathryn Stoner-Weiss argue convincingly that Putinite authoritarianism held Russia back economically at a time of oil windfalls, and that crime and corruption have actually worsened in the "stable" Putin years.

But will Putin's course really continue? Will Putin, the future Prime Minister, remain the Kremlin's puppet master, or will the mild-mannered Medvedev come into his own and toss his former friends overboard? Could he usher in a new liberalization? On these questions, the real outcome of the "election" is far from clear.

While most of Russia's embattled liberals cautioned against waiting for the "good czar," some pointed to possible signs of a "thaw"—such as reports that Nashi, the thuggish Putin-worshiping youth group, was being disbanded. (The daily newspaper Kommersant quoted a Kremlin insider as saying that the government no longer needed "foot-stomping mobs.")

Opinion was divided on the pro-government side as well. In early February, political analyst and former Putin administration staffer Vitaly Ivanov published a virulent column in the centrist business daily Vzglyad.ru jeering liberal hopes for a "second wind" and the idea that Putin could have picked a liberal successor. This was followed by a sharp retort from Vzglyad managing editor Yuri Girenko, who castigated both the radical opposition and diehard authoritarians for their "rejection of evolution." Ironically, a few liberal commentators saw Ivanov's shrill tirade as grounds for optimism—a hysterical outburst showing that the hardliners were getting nervous at the prospect of Medvedev moving in a liberal direction.

In a similar vein, Putin's macho swagger at his much-publicized February 16 press conference—in which he told foreign observers critical of Russia's elections to "teach their wives how to make cabbage soup" and suggested that, as prime minister, he would not hang a portrait of President Medvedev in his office—was interpreted by some as a sign of weakness rather than strength. In a caustic essay on EJ.ru, political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky depicted Putin as a lame duck lashing out angrily as the realization of his looming political impotence descends upon him. Wishful thinking or astute insight? In today's Russian political scene, it's often hard to tell the two apart.

For now, as the post-election days have made clear, Russia remains in a semi-authoritarian limbo in which every sign of freedom's survival is countered by evidence of steady and perhaps growing repression.

In the pro-government Izvestia, officious reports on the remarkable success of the election as an expression of the popular will coexisted with a scathing March 6 column by Dmitry Sokolov-Mitrich, who dismissed triumphalist rhetoric about the gains of the Putin-Medvedev era as a tissue of lies, "widening the gap of alienation between the government and the people" and leading Russia back into a Soviet-style dead-end. The paper's website, Izvestia.ru, also hosted a heretical video made for a student comedy festival, satirizing the election: a clip from the 1971 Soviet comedy Kidnapping, Caucasian Style, redubbed into a short in which a geeky "Medvedev" is invited to participate in a "pretend election" against three buffoonish rivals, but is chagrined to learn that Putin will become prime minister because "he just loves to be in the driver's seat."

Meanwhile, the day after the election also saw the return of Nashi, who held a couple of boisterous rallies in Moscow —perhaps, some Russian commentators speculated, as a message to Medvedev from their hard-line sponsors. Street action by the opposition fared far worse. The anti-Putin "Other Russia" coalition was initially denied permits to hold demonstrations in Moscow and St. Petersburg on March 3, on the grounds that the requested locations were not available. In violation of the law, the authorities did not suggest alternate locations. Finally, the city government in St. Petersburg relented and offered another route, with less visibility and access. In Moscow, about 50 dissenters defied the ban and tried to hold a protest, resulting in the now common arrests and beatings by the riot police. In St. Petersburg, the march took place without incident, but it coincided with the launch of a blatantly political case against a leading opposition activist, Maksim Reznik, chair of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Yabloko party.

In the early morning hours of March 3, Reznik was arrested outside the party's offices for "attacking a police officer" in a scuffle that was almost certainly a staged provocation. At the prosecutors' request, and without interviewing witnesses, the judge agreed to hold Reznik in pretrial detention for two months. In an especially troubling development, Reznik's participation in protest marches was cited by a prosecutor as proof of a "pattern of illegal behavior" and "a negative reflection on his character." Reznik remains in jail, and while some protests on his behalf have been allowed to proceed peacefully, others have ended in police provocations and arrests. In another transparently political case, Kasyanov's campaign workers around the country are harassed by the police and threatened with prosecution for "forging signatures."

This isn't an auspicious opening to the Medvedev—or "Putvedev"—era. The next "thaw" may yet be a few seasons away.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of Ceasefire!: Why Women and Men Must Join Forces to Achieve True Equality and Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood.

After Putin

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 07:00:00 EDT

In his eight years as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin has clamped down on his country’s newborn freedoms and returned it to a more confrontational stance toward the West. His second and constitutionally final term is scheduled to come to an end on May 7, 2008; as that date began to draw near, the perennial Kremlin power struggle that Winston Churchill once described as “a bulldog fight under the rug” grew more intense. The December 2007 elections for the Duma, the tamed Russian parliament, took a back seat to the mystery of presidential succession. Would Putin stay? Leave? Continue to rule through a figurehead heir? The only thing clear was that the decision would be made under that rug, with minimal input from the Russian people.

Putin solved part of the mystery on December 10 by endorsing a successor: deputy prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, a 42-year-old lawyer currently in charge of “national development projects.” He has also accepted Medvedev’s offer to take over as prime minister (which, under Russia’s current system, is mainly an administrative post with no political or executive power). Barring any surprises, the top jobs in the Kremlin for the next presidential term are filled.

Yet in many ways, Russia’s political future remains almost as much of a mystery as it was in the fall. The unknowns include whether 140 million residents will live in a partially free, liberalizing society or under increasingly authoritarian rule, and whether a country filled with nuclear missiles and vast energy resources will be an ally or enemy of the West.

Deciphering the Putin Plan
In late 2007, you could be excused for thinking that the Kremlin was clearing the way for some form of open-ended Putin presidency, if not a de facto coronation. In October, even as the former KGB chief announced he would join the ranks of mere mortals by heading up his United Russia Party’s list of candidates for parliamentary elections, a third-term-for-Putin movement gathered force, with a wave of “spontaneous” rallies, meetings, and other events around the country. The kind of adoration lavished on the termed-out president by his servile party and the equally servile state media did not suggest an impending retirement. On October 7 Rossiya, one of several government-owned national TV channels, marked Putin’s 55th birthday with a worshipful 20-minute tribute produced and narrated by Nikita Mikhalkov, the director of the 1994 Oscar-winning film Burnt by the Sun. Less than two weeks later, the government daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an open letter from several leading cultural figures, including the ubiquitous Mikhalkov, begging the dear leader to stay for a third term. “Russia,” they wrote, “needs your statesmanlike talent and your political wisdom.”

United Russia’s parliamentary campaign became a national Putin love-in. City streets and squares sprouted posters and banners celebrating a previously unheard-of Putin Plan, with such Soviet-flavored slogans as “The Putin Plan Is Working!” and “You, Too, Are a Part of Putin’s Plan,” sometimes helpfully accompanied by circles marked “pensions,” “salaries,” and “student aid.” A United Russia booklet titled “The Putin Plan Is Russia’s Victory!” featured photo after photo of the great man inspecting troops and strolling through wheat fields. United Russia and the government-run media touted the election itself as a referendum on a man whose post-election plans remained a mystery. Putin’s role as “national leader,” they declared, transcended mere constitutional time frames and had to be preserved one way or another. An essay by United Russia activist Abdul-Khakim Sultygov, posted on the party’s website in early November, advocated a “National Civic Council” that would formally anoint Putin as national leader.

The December parliamentary elections were brazenly rigged in favor of United Russia. Opposition leaders were all but barred from television (with the occasional exception of the private REN-TV channel, now owned by a Putin crony but still retaining vestiges of independence). Some parties were kept off the ballot: The authorities required a high number of signatures on their petitions, and many signatures were reportedly invalidated arbitrarily. Others, such as the pro-western Union of Right Forces, faced official harassment and intimidation; the police confiscated their campaign materials, and state TV rejected their ads as too negative or “extremist.” In the run-up to the election, the repression grew worse. Self-styled “Marches of Dissent” in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other cities, organized by the opposition to show that not everyone in Russia was on board the Putin bandwagon, were routinely dispersed by special security forces, with beatings that sent dozens of people to hospital emergency rooms. Putin himself, at a November 21 rally of 5,000 supporters, railed against “those who go jackaling around foreign embassies and diplomatic missions, relying on foreign foundations and governments rather than support from their own people.” The prominent “jackal” Gary Kasparov, chess grandmaster and founder of the dissenting Other Russia coalition, was arrested and detained for five days for attending a banned rally on Moscow’s Pushkin Square.

On December 2, the results were in: United Russia won a whopping 64 percent of the vote, followed by 11.5 percent for the Communists, 8 percent for the misnamed “Liberal Democratic Party of Russia” (led by the clownish right-wing provocateur Vladimir Zhirinovsky), and just under 8 percent for a new left-leaning party called Fair Russia, which hovers somewhere between loyal opposition and junior partner to the party in power. Russia’s democratic opposition finished dismally—the Union of Right Forces received slightly below 1 percent of the vote, the Yabloko (“Apple”) party about 1.5 percent—though liberals were still somewhat heartened by the fact that United Russia’s landslide victory wasn’t even bigger.

It’s hard to tell how different the results would have been in a fair contest. Media access was grossly unequal. Fraud was massive; in the southern province of Ingushetia, which is under virtual martial law, close to 100 percent of all eligible voters chose United Russia. There was also widespread vote-coercion—of soldiers on army bases, patients in hospitals, and employees at government institutions. In a post-election wrap-up commentary on the radio station Echo of Moscow, the political satirist Victor Shenderovich compared United Russia’s posters thanking voters for their support to rapists sending flowers to their victims. The metaphor was a little extreme: For the most part, the Russian electorate was not so much raped as alternately seduced and bullied into submitting in front of a powerful, oil-rich provider and protector. But popular passion for the victors was clearly lacking. The fact that the Putin regime was anxious enough to defame and suppress the opposition suggests that it did not feel entirely secure.

Having sewn up its dominance in the Duma, United Russia was widely expected to try to change the constitution to let Putin stay in office. Yet one week later, on December 10, United Russia and three other pro-government parties nominated Medvedev as their presidential candidate. Putin publicly endorsed his old protégé, who in turn said on television that he would agree to run only on the condition that Putin would pick up the reins as prime minister. While Medvedev’s election seemed virtually assured at press time, this news still raised more questions than it answered. Is Russia in for a non-succession succession in which Putin will remain the de facto head of state? Or would a Medvedev presidency usher in a possible liberalization? A power struggle in which the loyal protégé might turn on his mentor?

Semi-Autonomous Zone
With the rollback of post-Soviet freedoms in the Putin era —the restoration of censorship, the assaults on the multiparty system, even the return of the old Soviet anthem with updated lyrics—it is tempting to view the Putin regime as a regression to Soviet communism. Certainly, there are striking echoes and parallels. Izvestia television columnist Irina Petrovskaya has pointedly compared Mikhalkov’s birthday panegyric to a 1970s documentary extolling Brezhnev. The “Putin Plan” booklet evokes Soviet-era imagery, and there are echoes of the Stalin cult in praises of Putin’s “wisdom” and statesmanship. Putinism has even developed its equivalent of the ubiquitous Soviet-era children’s and youth organizations: “Nashi” (Our Guys), a semi-official movement for people ages 18 to 25 that promotes old-fashioned morality and harassment of opposition activists, and “Mishki” (Little Bears), a Nashi-sponsored group for the eight-to-15 set that bandies about such slogans as “Thank you, President Putin, for our stable future.”

But Putin is not Brezhnev or Stalin. A Soviet-era Rip van Winkle waking up in Putin’s Russia would not easily recognize his country. Western companies and consumer goods are omnipresent. Russian TV may be largely scrubbed of dissent, but it offers a superficially plausible simulacrum of Western-style programming, from celebrity gossip to daytime soaps to sensational, often gory crime news.

Despite periodic outbursts of anti-Western rhetoric, the Putinites are clearly anxious to be accepted by the West as equal, “civilized” partners. They have made occasional noises about a uniquely Russian political path, such as an attempt in late 2006 to popularize the concept of “sovereign democracy” (which essentially boiled down to “we’ll make democracy our own way—butt out!”). But they do not try to assert, as Soviet leaders did, that they have a different and better conception of human rights and freedoms; they just claim that rights and freedoms in the usual Western sense are thriving in Russia, with their exercise merely hampered a little by the hardships of transition. There has been some partial rehabilitation of the Soviet period—particularly of Putin’s beloved alma mater, the KGB—but this has its limits; a controversial high school history textbook recently omitted from its final version a particularly odious chapter presenting a whitewashed Stalin. If Putinism has an ideology, it is not Marxism but a pseudo-populist statism laced with religion, which is touted as society’s moral guide and foundation. (The Russian Orthodox Church, in particular, is closely allied with the government.)

The practice behind the rhetoric, meanwhile, is a corrupt crony capitalism in which public/private corporate hybrids roam the land—dominated by Gazprom, the oil-and-gas leviathan. The boundaries between business and government are infinitely flexible. (The Russian political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin has dubbed this bureaucratic business class “bureness.”) It is a system in which an obscure ex-KGB man turned oil trader named Gennady Timchenko, a longtime Putin pal, is worth some $14 billion as co-owner of the Russian/Swedish petroleum export company Gunvor. It is a system in which other Friends of Vlad control virtually all of Russia’s oil and gas industry. It is a system in which, according to The Moscow Times, United Russia sold slots on its candidate list for as much as $4 million.

In short, Putinism is not a return to communism so much as a movement toward the capitalism of Soviet caricature: the rule of robber barons who control the state behind a façade of pretend democracy, with religion as an opiate for the masses and televised bread and circuses to further pacify the people.

Yet under this corrupt authoritarian regime, there remains a semi-free space that would have been unthinkable under totalitarian Soviet rule. It is a space that permits some latitude for the print media; even the pro-government daily Izvestia still publishes dissenting voices such as
Petrovskaya and Maksim Sokolov, a commentator who directs his caustic swipes equally at the government and the opposition. Echo of Moscow, the radio station whose independent future seemed in question a few months ago in the hands of a new pro-government management, continues to provide a platform to vocal critics of the regime. Between the radio, the newspapers, and growing access to the Internet, free speech has a solid foothold in Russia.

This niche market is constantly under threat. In 2007, an opposition website was fined 20,000 rubles (about $820) for publishing an article that referred to Putin as “Russia’s phallic symbol.” In December, New Times reporter Natalia Morari—a Moldovan citizen with legal residency in Russia who has written several articles exposing corruption—was unexpectedly denied re-entry to the country following a trip to Israel, on unspecified “national security” grounds.

And yet, in this semi-autonomous space, surprises still abound. For instance:

• In November, the political satirist Shenderovich held a solitary protest on a Moscow street with a “Free Gary Kasparov!” sign. (Under Russian law, lone protests, unlike group events, can be held without official authorization.) After politely declining a police request to leave, Shenderovich was suddenly joined by a smirking young man armed with an opposition party sign—which immediately turned his legal one-man protest into unlawful assembly. As both were hustled into a police car, the young man unabashedly admitted that he was a plant. After a few hours at the police precinct, Shenderovich was released (but not before signing autographs for the cops). In January, the case against him ended in acquittal.

• Petrovskaya’s scathing Izvestia review of the Putin birthday tribute, initially killed by the editors, was eventually allowed to run (albeit paired with an opposing viewpoint) after the story was discussed on Echo of Moscow and picked up by liberal websites such as Grani.ru.

• The open letter begging Putin to stay for another term “in the name of Russia’s art community” brought forth a public backlash from other artists, including the popular singer and Duma member Iosif Kobzon. On October 25, the NTV channel’s debate program At the Bar had Mikhalkov square off against writer Venedikt Yerofeyev, who castigated the filmmaker for encouraging Putin to violate the constitution and addressing him in servile terms more befitting a sultan than a democratically elected president. When a testy Mikhalkov asked, “Who told you I’m promoting a personality cult?” Yerofeyev shot back, “I’m telling you.” Three of the four in-studio judges declared Mikhalkov the winner, but the viewer call-in vote went for Yerofeyev, 90,000 to 52,000.

Writing on Grani.ru, the columnist Adrian Piontkovsky argued that the program may have been a small but important turning point in Russia’s political life. The independent-minded portion of society found its voice and spoke against the “government-fostered little personality cult” of Putin. It’s hard to say whether this popular reaction, along with the tepid landslide of December 2, had anything to do with Putin’s decision not to seek a third term. Notably, too, the essay advocating Putin’s confirmation as “national leader” was removed from United Russia’s website after a chorus of pointed criticism. (In another curious development, the Nashi youth organization, built largely around Putin worship, underwent a rapid decline by the end of 2007. Its rallies thinned, and its loss of official favor was evident when it attempted to picket the European Commission offices in Moscow to protest the denial of travel visas to some of its activists. The demonstration ended with police intervention and arrests.)

Russian civil society, then, may not be as dead as it seems. And Russia’s repressive machine, despite its petty viciousness, is far from reopening the gates of the gulag.

Wishing for a Better Czar
What will happen to Putin’s machine as he formally leaves office? There is little doubt that it will be used, if necessary, to ensure an uneventful succession. Already, Kasparov has been denied the opportunity to register his presidential bid because the initiative group for his nomination was unable—apparently due to behind-the-scenes government pressure—to lease a space to hold the nomination conference by the registration deadline. At press time, it appears that the other leading opposition candidate, Putin’s former prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, will be disqualified from running, on the grounds of allegedly invalid signatures on his nominating petitions (though in any case, his chances of winning were only theoretically above zero). In Russia, the introduction of Dmitry Medvedev as “the next president” is not merely a figure of speech, as it is in America. Every Russian journalist assumes that the election results are a foregone conclusion, with a “play communist” and a “play liberal” joining Medvedev on the ballot merely for decency’s sake.

But what then? Putin has vowed, more than once, that there will be no redistribution of power from the presidency to the office of prime minister. No one knows whether to take him at his word. It is widely believed that Medvedev was picked because he is a Putin protégé who will be easily controlled by his former boss. Yet a number of Russian commentators suggest there may come a day when even the “good boy” Medvedev will realize that real power is now in his hands to use as he pleases.

Many liberals are at least somewhat encouraged by this situation. They anticipate the growth of a dual power structure, an unwieldy beast with its loyalties divided between Putin and Medvedev. Political scientist Dmitry Oreshkin argues that at the very least, under a Medvedev/Putin (or Putin/Medvedev) regime, different interest groups within the state-corporate leviathan will solidify into competing factions that unwittingly act as checks and balances on each other. Still others speculate that Putin is not interested in maintaining an active role in Russian politics and wants to stay close to the center of power only to avoid being tossed to the wolves in case the economy falters and the new government needs a scapegoat.

Some dissidents even suggest that Medvedev is, in the words of the columnist and radio commentator Yulia Latynina, the “best of successors”—the standard-bearer, perhaps, of Putinism with a human face. In the past, Medvedev has cautiously voiced concern about the government’s assault on the YUKOS oil company (owned by Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky), and has criticized the aforementioned concept of “sovereign democracy.” He is also one of the few men in Putin’s inner circle who does not have a KGB background. Medvedev belongs, Latynina notes hopefully, to a different, post-Soviet generation. (Of course, no one knows how that will play out. The political analyst Stanislav Belkovsky cautions that Medvedev may take steps to curb political speech on the Internet because, unlike the older-generation Putin, he understands the Web’s power and relevance.)

So three months before the presidential election, Russian liberals were reduced to hoping, yet again, for a better Czar—or for a good-Czar/bad-Czar system whose inherent tensions may cause the authoritarian regime to collapse upon itself. Yet there may also be some other checks on the Russian state, from the elites’ desire for acceptance by the West to the small and battered voice of Russia’s own civil society. Post-Communist Russian democracy, like Communism itself, is dead. The authoritarian system that has risen on its wreckage is not a pretty sight. But there are still signs of life.

Contributing Editor Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood (Ticknor & Fields).

Stuff I've Been Meaning to Blog

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:26:00 EST

From Nicholson Baker, one of the best essays I've read about Wikipedia.

Wired on the autistic pride movement.

A sequel to Stop Snitching.

Plagiarism in the world of online dating.

"Kremlin hawks feed conspiracy theories with 3,200 white mice."

Russian Bombers Buzz the Nimitz

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 12:11:00 EST

Cold War nostalgics and Putin paranoia mongers rejoice! From CNN:

American fighter jets intercepted two Russian bombers, one of which buzzed a U.S. aircraft carrier in the western Pacific on Saturday......
Russia's Defense Ministry said Tuesday that there was no violation of flight regulations during the incident. A ministry official said the flights are standard operating procedure for air force training.
One of them twice flew about 2,000 feet over the deck of the USS Nimitz Saturday......
The Russians and the U.S. carrier did not exchange verbal communications.
Four turboprop Tupolev-95 Bear bombers took off from Ukrainka Air Base, in Russia's Far East, in the middle of the night, Japanese officials told The Associated Press, adding that one of the planes violated Japanese airspace.
Russian bombers have been making flights over the western Pacific for several months
There have been eight incidents off Alaska since July. Among the latest, on September 5, six F-15s from Elmendorf Air Force Base, adjacent to Anchorage, Alaska, intercepted six Russian bombers about 50 miles from the northwest coast of Alaska.

Cathy Young on the complicated Vladimir Putin, back in January 2005 and subscribers should look for her latest feature reporting on Putin in a soon-forthcoming issue of reason.

Why Are Russian Women So Hot?

rbalko@reason.com (Radley Balko) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:29:00 EST

Anne Applebaum says thank the free market!

To put it bluntly, in the Soviet Union there was no market for female beauty. No fashion magazines featured beautiful women, since there weren't any fashion magazines. No TV series depended upon beautiful women for high ratings, since there weren't any ratings. There weren't many men rich enough to seek out beautiful women and marry them, and foreign men couldn't get the right sort of visa. There were a few film stars, of course, but some of the most famous—I'm thinking of Lyubov Orlova, alleged to be Stalin's favorite actress—were wholesome and cheerful rather than sultry and stunning. Unusual beauty, like unusual genius, was considered highly suspicious in the Soviet Union and its satellite people's republics.
This doesn't mean there weren't any beautiful women, of course, just that they didn't have the clothes or cosmetics to enhance their looks, and, far more important, they couldn't use their faces to launch international careers. Instead of gracing London drawing rooms, they stayed in Minsk, Omsk, or Alma Ata. Instead of couture, they wore cheap polyester. They could become assembly-line forewomen, Communist Party bosses, even local femmes fatales, but not Vogue cover girls. They didn't even dream of becoming Vogue cover girls, since very few had ever seen an edition of Vogue.

Applebaum concludes:

Beauty is a matter of luck, but the same could be said of many other talents. And what open markets do for beautiful women they also do for other sorts of genius. So, cheer up next time you see a Siberian blonde dominating male attention at the far end of the table: The same mechanisms that brought her to your dinner party might one day bring you the Ukrainian doctor who cures your cancer or the Polish stockbroker who makes your fortune.

Lenin on Ice

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:03:00 EST

Explorers discover an Elder Thing in the Antarctic ice:

Scientists trekking across a little visited part of Antarctica have discovered a bizarre relic of the Soviet Union is dominating the South Pole of Inaccessibility.

In the middle of nowhere -- literally the point on Antarctica furthest from the sea -- an imposing bust of revolutionary Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin peers out onto the polar emptiness....

The Scientific Traverse this week made it to the Inaccessibility Pole for New Year's Day and found a one time Soviet Union base buried under the ice.

The group's website says Soviet scientists first visited the Pole in December 1958 and built a small cabin there.

After several weeks they left, putting the bust of Lenin on top of the chimney facing Moscow.

Here he is:

[Hat tip: Bryan Alexander]

Friday Funnies

info@reason.com (Scott Stantis) — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 06:29:00 EST

Another Strike for the Chosen One!

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 09:53:00 EST

Time's new Person of the Year is an iconic figure. Literally.

The Bolshaya Elnya village in the Nizhny Novgorod Region is home to the "Rus' Resurrecting" sect, a group of local residents who believe that President Putin was both the Apostle Paul and King Solomon in previous lives....

"We didn't choose Putin," Mother Fontinya told the Moskovsky Komsomolets paper, expounding on the first time she laid eyes on the "holy one."

"It was when Yeltsin was naming him as his successor [during a live New Year's Eve TV broadcast in 1999]. My soul exploded with joy! 'An ubermensch! God himself has chosen him!'" I cried.

"Yeltsin was the destroyer, and God replaced him with his creation," claimed Fontinya.

The sect possesses a President Putin icon that Fontinya claims miraculously appeared one day.

"He has given us everything," she said, pointing to the sky.

Report: Chechens Grateful for Bombing of Grozny

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 11:40:00 EST

Via Reuters, some details of Vladimir Putin's dodgy landslide victory in Saturday's election. According to recently released figures from the country's Central Election Commission, Putin managed a Saddam Hussein-like showing in Chechnya, a country not previously known for its slavish devotion to the Kremlin line:

Russia's volatile Chechnya, once President Vladimir Putin's biggest headache, ironically turned out to be a big success story for him in Sunday's election, according to official figures.

But the Central Election Commission's figures, showing that Chechens voted in droves for the Kremlin chief's party United Russia, had some locals scratching their heads.

[...]

The figures indicated that 99.2 percent of voters in the war-ravaged region of southern Russia had taken part in the poll and 99.3 percent of them had voted for United Russia.

This was the highest vote for Putin anywhere in Russia, where overall turnout was 62 percent and just over 64 percent of votes were cast for United Russia.

Full story.

(Hat tip: Rob W.)

The Cold War's Return

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 12:33:00 EST

On December 2 voters in Russia and Venezuela will go to the polls, choosing to either accelerate the Sovietization and Sandinistaization of their respective societies or—an eventuality that seems less likely—to curtail the centralization of power in the hands of increasingly villainous chief executives. In Russia, parliamentary elections will doubtless further demonstrate the plenary power of Vladimir Putin, who is constitutionally forbidden from seeking a third term in office though is being advised, Kremlin sources recently told Reuters, to exploit a legal loophole that would allow him to run for another four-year term. In Venezuela, voters will decide on 69 separate changes to the country’s “Bolivarian” constitution—previously rewritten by President Hugo Chavez in 1999—including the right of the president to be re-elected indefinitely and a state-mandated six-hour workday. The apparent popularity of Chavez’s constitutional tinkering has prompted Bolivian President Evo Morales, Venezuela’s closest South American ally, to push a similar preliminary bill through parliament that will unburden the executive from constitutional limits on re-election.

Though they both reportedly enjoy widespread popularity, neither Chavez nor Putin are taking any chances (and independent polling data from both countries suggest that such unease might be justified). In the run-up to the election in Russia, Mr. Putin has launched a fresh wave of crackdowns on opposition leaders and media outlets. Last weekend police descended upon protesters in St. Petersburg, arresting 200 opposition politicians and activists, including Boris Nemtsov, leader of Union of Rightist Forces, and Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion who heads the opposition coalition The Other Russia, as they marched, with barely concealed symbolism, toward the Winter Palace. For his participation in the “illegal” demonstration, Kasparov was sentenced to five days in jail.

Attacks on the independent press are also increasingly common, with murdered Kremlin critics Alexander Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya only the most prominent examples. Last week the opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta—which is, says the Washington Post’s Moscow correspondent, “one of the last outposts of critical journalism in Russia”—was forced to suspend publication of a regional edition after its offices were raided and authorities declared the paper in violation of copyright laws for supposedly possessing “pirated software.” According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, two of the paper’s other outposts were also raided in 2007, with the authorities again using the possession of counterfeit software as a pretext.

Such public assaults on political opponents could account for the findings of a recent VTsIOM poll demonstrating a startling drop in support for Putin’s party: 57 percent said they will cast their ballot for United Russia, a 10 percent drop from the company’s previous survey. But in an increasingly Sovietized Russia, where the government controls a disconcerting number of media outlets (the last independent television station was commandeered by the government in 2002), an electoral rejection of Putin is still extremely unlikely. According to the English-language newspaper The Moscow Times, the lead-up to this election has “seen a powerful media campaign boosting Putin and his subordinate United Russia party…Putin has commanded blanket news coverage."

But most distressing are reports that United Russia party officials recently “called in thousands of staff on their day off in an attempt to engineer a massive and inflated victory for President Vladimir Putin,” according to a story in Britain’s Guardian newspaper. If they choose not to heed the bullying “recommendations” of party heavies, state employees “risk losing their jobs, their accommodation or bonuses”; university students are being threatened with failing grades and expulsion. (Hugo Chavez has employed a similar system of intimidation, using the “Tascon List,” which identified 2 million-plus citizens who voted to recall the president, to push people out of state jobs and refuse state benefits and services to political enemies.)

But Putin’s increasingly long reach isn’t limited to control of the news media and public sector workers; his influence, like that of his Soviet forbearers, naturally extends to classroom curricula. A Russian text book judged insufficiently obsequious to the regime was recalled on orders from the Kremlin, to be replaced by a new text featuring a gushing paean to Putin ( "We see that practically every significant deed is connected with the name and activity of President V.V. Putin"), a Pravda-like section on the crimes of America, and a mealy-mouthed apologia for Comrade Stalin ("The most successful leader of the U.S.S.R.").

Besides nourishing an expanding personality cult of his own, Putin has actively worked to rehabilitate the Soviet past, declaring in 2005 that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”

Such Sovietophilia was detectable from the very beginning of his reign, when the newly-installed President presided over the reinstatement of a plaque at the KGB’s notorious Lubyanka headquarters celebrating former Soviet Premier Yuri Andropov, architect of the brutal repression of the “Prague Spring,” as an “outstanding political figure.” Earlier this month, Putin, with a troupe of saturnine, medal-bedecked KGB men in tow, attended a champagne reception to posthumously award the highest state honor to George Koval, an American who passed atom bomb secrets to Stalin. Considering this ongoing reassessment of Soviet history and historiography, it’s unexceptional that, according to a report from Radio Free Europe, a recent study of Russians found that “45 percent of respondents said they believed Stalin had played a largely positive role in Russia's history.” In fact, Stalin was deemed “Russia's second-most successful leader since the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution”—losing out only to Mr. Putin.

In Venezuela, Putin’s ally Hugo Chavez seems to be mimicking not the failed Soviet project, but the failed revolution of Nicaragua’s Sandinistas—though this time with the benefit of vast oil wealth. While the Venezuelan government allows the publication of opposition newspapers—in Nicaragua, this was a role filled by Jamie Chamorro and La Prensa, a newspaper that existed throughout the dictatorship but was subject to frequent harassment, censorship and closure by the junta—the press is cowed by threats of government action and the use of libel writs brought before friendly, Chavista judges.

In the case of opposition television channel RCTV, the Chavez government was more explicit, simply refusing to renew the station’s license (required to operate on the public band, though it can still reach a much audience via cable and the Internet), without offering the accused an opportunity to defend itself against charges of sedition. When RCTV was ejected from the airwaves, its slot was taken over by yet another government-run propaganda channel in the mold of ViVe, a “public service” network that devoted significant airtime in the election run-up mocking opposition protestors and admonishing viewers to vote ‘Si!’ to the constitutional changes (ViVe can be watched live here; archived documentaries on the philosophy of Mao and Marx archived here; RCTV on government station VTV’s coverage of recent student protests here).

Parallels to the Sandinista regime, unfortunately for the people of Venezuela, don’t stop there. In one less-remarked upon provision, the new constitution would attempt to solidify Chavez’s base by lowering the voting age from 18 to 16 years-old, a tactic the Nicaraguan government successfully employed during its rigged 1984 election (Cuba too has a voting age of 16, though no elections to speak of). Chavez has also echoed the revolutionary rhetoric of Daniel Ortega, smearing any and all opponents as a spies and fifth-columnists; agents of the “Empire” and enemies of the people. So when former Minister of Defense and Chavez confidant Gen. Raúl Isaías Baduel publically broke with the government, saying that the proposed changes to the constitution amounted to a soft coup d’état, his former boss unleashed his full fury, threatening those who run afoul of the revolution: "He who says he supports Chavez but votes 'no' is a traitor, a true traitor. He's against me, against the revolution and against the people." Such rhetorical thuggery is, alas, the least of the oppositions concerns; protests and gatherings are often met by armed members of local “Bolivarian Circles,” state sanction gangs charged with protecting the revolution and modeled on Cuba’s “Committee for the Defense of the Revolution” and Ortega’s “Turbas Divinas,” or “divine mobs.”

Despite their obvious contempt for democratic institutions, both leaders still command a disturbing, though hardly overwhelming, level of Western support; defenders who will doubtless welcome a Chavez or Putin electoral victory and retrenchment. In the American Conservative, British writer John Laughland lauds Putin’s economic record and remarks that his ideology isn’t much different from your average European social democrat (This was, alas, meant as a compliment). A columnist for the Huffington Post described, somewhat clumsily, Chavez’s power grab as an attempt “democratize political power to the grassroots of the majority more thoroughly than anything we have seen in this hemisphere... ever.” Another Huffington Post columnist lamented that Chavez’s revisions to the constitution are “falsely portrayed by many in the U.S. media as anti-democratic.”

But the media have this one right. Both Chavez and Putin are attempting to reset the clock on the Cold War, and neither of them is terribly interested in promoting democratic institutions or ensuring a fair, transparent electoral process. And if recent history is any judge, come Sunday morning both Russia and Venezuela might very well be further down the path to the one party state.

Michael C. Moynihan is an associate editor of reason.

Kasparov's Minority Attack

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 16:14:00 EDT

Over at reason.tv I've posted a fantastic interview with chess master and Putin-hater Garry Kasparov from last week's Real Time with Bill Maher. Kasparov questions Putin's approval ratings, takes a few well-deserved shots at President Bush's ability to see into ex-KGB agents' souls, and assesses the impact of high oil prices on Russian democracy.

Also, check out Kasparov's recent Wall Street Journal article on "Don Putin" (that's a mafia reference, not Mr. Putin's estranged, Roger Clinton-like brother). A sample:

After years of showing no respect for the law in Russia, with no resulting consequences from abroad, it should not come as a surprise that Mr. Putin's attitude extends to international relations as well. The man accused of the Litvinenko murder, Andrei Lugovoi, signs autographs and enjoys the support of the Russian media, which says and does nothing without Kremlin approval. For seven years the West has tried to change the Kremlin with kind words and compliance. It apparently believed that it would be able to integrate Mr. Putin and his gang into the Western system of trade and diplomacy.
Instead, the opposite has happened--the mafia corrupts everything it touches. Bartering in human rights begins to appear acceptable. The Kremlin is not changing its standards: It is imposing them on the outside world. It receives the stamp of legitimacy from Western leaders and businesses but makes those same leaders and businesses complicit in its crimes.

Whole article here.

Why Sputnik Went Kaputnik or, Don't Diss the Discus!

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 18:02:00 EDT

Is it just me, or have the opinion pages at The Los Angeles Times sure gotten a lot more interesting since that fine paper kidnapped two former reason staffers, Matt Welch and Tim Cavanaugh, like the Symbionese Liberation Army snatched Patty Hearst?

Yesterday to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the day that the U.S. collectively crapped its Cold War pants, a.k.a the day Sputnik I went into orbit, the Times mused in an unsigned editorial smartly dubbed "Satellite vs. supermarket:

A weird feature of the Cold War was America's tendency to choose the few areas in which the Soviet Union excelled and to make them the grounds for symbolic contests. International chess, classical piano competitions, Olympic sports (what red-blooded American hurls a discus?) -- those were things the Russians were good at. True to form, the United States reacted to Sputnik with orotund calls to national purpose and a collectivized space program that mirrored the Russian program down to its hybrid military/scientific mission. Just as Sputnik itself was a technological experiment attached to what was originally merely a ballistic missile project, so the first Explorer launch was crammed with equipment -- including a Geiger counter that detected the existence of the Van Allen radiation belts, the first important discovery of the Space Age.

The nameless, faceless, breathless (?) writer, the journalistic equivalent of a Charlie X victim, concludes:

In the end, the U.S. tendency to play to its weaknesses didn't matter. The economy was so vast that its runoff alone was enough to swamp the Soviets. The real symbolic victory of the Space Age may not have been Apollo 11 but "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial," that paean to American wealth (marking its own -- silver -- anniversary this year) that posits a nation so rich even a supposedly middle-class Tujunga family has enough junk lying around the house to build a radio capable of communicating with aliens. The "private standard of life" [that idiotic but revered journalist Walter] Lippmann deplored was the base on which the achievements of the Space Age were built -- including NASA, a Cold War relic that even its admirers concede is an arcane bureaucracy, and yet one that still manages to do some amazing things.

Whole thing here.

That's good stuff, I think, and all too true--except for NASA doing amazing things. The real mission of NASA is to waste time, energy, resources, and the occasional life while shredding massive amounts of taxpayers dollars and probably retarding actual development of the field in which it operates. In this, alas, NASA is no different than many other federal organizations.

But more to the point, the Times is simply wrong when it rhetorically asks, "What red-blooded American hurls a discus?" From the first modern Olympic Games, held in 1896, through the 1976 Montreal Games, U.S. men totally dominated the event, winning 14 of a possible 19 gold medals. Most of those golds came before the Soviets competed in the Olympics (the Reds first took the field in the 1952 Games), but from 1952 through 1976 (the last Cold War Olympics in which the Soviets and Americans both participated, save for '88), American men won seven out of eight golds (a Czech took the other).

Four of those golds--from grand Cold War years '56, '60, '64, and '68--belonged to the amazing Al Oerter, the first track and field athlete to win four straight titles and whose triumph over injury and pain is the sort of inspirational story the Olympics managed to produce with stunning regularity.

To be sure, the Olympics don't matter anymore, for all sorts of reasons but especially because the Cold War is as dead as Sen. Larry Craig's resignation. And there's no question the Cold War drove us all mad--mad enough to take chess seriously, at least until Bobby Fisher went apeshit with anti-Semitism. And there's no question that the Soviets lost the Cold War precisely because they wouldn't or couldn't compete with good old American junk culture.

But please LA Times, don't diss the discus. Especially since Al Oerter, that great proxy Cold Warrior who taught a small but touching lesson about human triumph over adversity, died just this past Tuesday, a couple of days short of the Sputnik anniversary.

Putin and Stalin

schapman@tribune.com (Steve Chapman) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 15:20:00 EDT

In most countries, the future is impossible to predict, but the past doesn't change. In Russia, it's just the opposite.

President Vladimir Putin, when he is not busy restoring autocracy to a country that has known little else, has taken on the task of refreshing Russian history with a novel perspective—his own. He is on record lamenting the collapse of the Soviet Union as "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." It was worse, apparently, than World War I, worse than World War II—worse, even, than the creation of the Soviet Union.

Last year, the president informed a group of history teachers that Russia "has nothing to be ashamed of" and that it was their job to make students "proud of their motherland." His government has tried to help by commissioning guidelines and books that present a more balanced picture of Joseph Stalin, described in one approved volume as "the most successful Soviet leader ever."

That sentiment could be taken as ironic—on the order of praising a slag heap as the most picturesque of its genre. In fact, Putin really wants to commend a dictator who, if he was not the most savage and destructive criminal of the 20th century, certainly ranks in the top three, with Hitler and Mao. The efforts at rehabilitation may be working. One poll found that 54 percent of young Russians think Stalin was "a wise leader."

To reach that conclusion, you have to excuse or forget the biggest events of Stalin's quarter-century rule, which left vast piles of corpses. His first notable "achievement" was trying to raise agricultural output by forcing millions of peasant farmers into collective farms—while wiping out supposedly prosperous farmers whom he condemned as vicious class enemies. In what a Marxist scholar later called "probably the most massive warlike operation ever conducted by a state against its own citizens," hordes of peasants were killed or sent to Siberia.

The new textbooks suggest that Stalin's methods, though harsh, served the important need of bringing about economic progress. But the collectivization drive brought on a famine that was one of the worst the world has ever seen.

In Ukraine, shortages were so severe that starving people were driven to cannibalism to survive—forcing authorities to post signs that said, "Eating dead children is barbarism." In combination with the mass executions and deaths in concentration camps, the famine cost more than 14 million people their lives.

But Stalin didn't attack only his class enemies. His allies were equally at risk. During the Great Terror of the 1930s, he launched a purge of close aides, officials as well as ordinary members of the Communist Party, secret police, diplomats and military commanders. This frenzy killed millions, many of them worked to death in the vast network of labor camps that became known as the Gulag Archipelago.

Putin's propaganda celebrates Stalin for winning World War II. But if not for his paranoia and gullibility, the war would have been far easier to win.

If Stalin's plans had worked out, the Soviet Union would not have stood against the Nazis. At the outset, he entered into an alliance with Hitler which allowed him to recover Russian land lost in World War I, annex various Baltic nations and swallow up a chunk of Poland.

His reward was to be double-crossed in 1941, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Writes historian Paul Johnson, "Stalin, who trusted nobody else, appears to have been the last human being on earth to trust Hitler's word." In the conflict that followed, there is no telling how many soldiers died because the Red Army had been purged of its best officers by Stalin.

The new texts compare Stalin to Otto von Bismarck, the "Iron Chancellor" who unified Germany in the 19th century. But though Bismarck fought his neighbors on the battlefield, he didn't make war on his people. The latter habit is what distinguishes Stalin. If his record is grounds for pride, what could possibly be grounds for shame?

Putin's people deserve sympathy for the burdens the past has placed on them, but those don't justify his attempt to promote self-deception. Germans have proven it is possible to build a thriving nation without being blind to one's own history. Russians should respond to this campaign not with pride but with fear. If a government can justify what Stalin did, it can justify anything it wants to do.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Here Come the Cyber Wars

info@reason.com (Michael Weiss) — Fri, 17 Aug 2007 13:18:00 EDT

Last May, Estonia was invaded. Rather than tanks and aircraft, the medium of trespass was fiber optic cables—which is nearly as bad, for such a wired country. The "cyberwar," which was precipitated by the controversial relocation of a World War II monument in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, drew international headlines, mainly focused on the Clancy-esque gizmology behind it. "Distributed-denial-of-service" has now entered the lexicon not as a symptom of disaffected Baltic waiters, but as a means of bringing down a country with spam. NATO, which used to only contend with enemy garrisons and missile silos on European soil, now finds itself dispatching allied geek squads to protect against that 21^st century species of automaton: the "botnet."

The U.S. has announced plans to form its own "Cyber Command," a kind of digital NORAD, to better prepare key levels of state and economic infrastructure against foreign hackers. Yet lost in all the bit-rate analysis of Estonia's springtime troubles was any discussion of how the unconventional siege conventionally violated a nation's sovereignty, not to mention its citizens' human rights.

With a tiny population of 1.4 million, Estonia is almost entirely run on computers. The land that helped develop the free VOIP and instant messenger program Skype hosts wireless zones not just on cafe-lined streets, but in gas stations and remote national parks. Estonians bank, vote and pay their taxes online through digital identity cards that are scanned by easy insertion into slots in their laptops, devices that the country's "paperless" government uses to conduct cabinet meetings and draft legislation. Indeed, so proud was Estonia of its commitment to broadband efficiency—and the web's concomitant freedom of information—that its parliament passed a law in 2000 declaring Internet access a basic human right.

Symbolic though the law might be, it is still the product of a representative democracy in a sovereign EU-member nation. A coordinated attack on Estonia's digital infrastructure is therefore not just a "national security situation," as Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo rightly put it, but also a cause for the United Nations Human Rights Council and Amnesty International. Both organizations have yet to comment on the Estonian cyberwar, although a spokesperson from Amnesty International told me a statement is in the works. She had no idea, though, that Estonia even considered Internet access a human right.

In a sense, the trouble began over human rights, at least as they are defined by cold war historiographers. In April, the Estonian government decided, after much internal debate, to relocate the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn. Cast as a solemn, head-lowered "Ivan" of World War II, the statue was actually the centerpiece of an oddly placed urban sepulcher for the remains of nameless Red Army soldiers who died in the "liberation" of Estonia from Nazi occupation. Unveiled in 1947 by the returning Soviet occupiers, who had been kicked out by the Nazis, the Bronze Soldier was met with mixed feelings by ethnic Estonians, who were then subjected to half a century of Russian rule, under which a tenth of the population was deported to the gulag. Nevertheless, many patriotic Estonians remember that 11,000 of their compatriots, forcibly drafted into the Red Army, died fighting Hitler. Adding to the anger and frustration the Estonian man-in-the-street must have felt toward the statue, Stalin and Hitler had haggled over Baltic states in their notorious prewar negotiations, which culminated in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. In liberating Estonia, the USSR was more expelling its former competitor for imperial real estate than doing much for Estonians.

It's important to see the Bronze Solider for what it really was: imperialist propaganda, not a solemn consecration of war dead. The USSR loved to establish ad hoc burial grounds in the most visible locations of their occupied cities. The one in Tallinn, situated in the center of Tõnismägi Hill, was dubbed "Liberators' Square"—communist reliquary construction at its finest. Even before Estonia gained independence in 1991, the Kremlin satraps who ran the country hardly abided by their own catechism for glorifying the motherland. They built a bus station and a busy intersection directly on Tõnismägi Hill, turning it into an accessible rallying point for Russian extremists, the sort responsible for the two days of rioting that engulfed Tallinn in late April and in which 100 people were injured and one person killed.

These lumpen elements are mainly members of the nationalist Nashi ("Ours") movement, which is headquartered in Moscow and suborned by the Putin regime. The Russian president may now describe himself as the only "absolute, pure democrat" on the planet, but that doesn't mean he'll stop Nashi thugs from attacking the Estonian ambassador in Moscow, even though he's bound by the Vienna Convention to do so. To give some indication of just how upset Moscow gets when threatened with the tampering of its Stalinist legacy, the Russian Federation Council passed a resolution in January calling the imminent relocation of the Bronze Solider "an attempt to legalize fascism."

That Russians are once more resorting to Popular Front rhetoric is characteristic, but also ironic given that Estonia's relocation of the Bronze Statue was actually undertaken with great care and sensitivity, and included the long-awaited identification of the Red Army fallen by DNA testing. Russian's "unknown" soldiers are known at last, and will this month be re-interred in the cemetery of the Estonian Defense Forces. This is all of a piece with Estonia's passage of the War Graves Protection Act in January 2007, designed to align the nation's standard for honoring of military victims with the Geneva Conventions. No NGO or supranational body has objected to the Bronze Soldier's transplantation; only the Russian government has.

Whether or not the Kremlin is behind the violation is almost beside the point, although it is it curious that the cyber-attacks peaked on May 8 and 9, the calendar dates marking the Red Army's defeat of the Wehrmacht. Some Estonians I've talked to are of the opinion that if Moscow was in fact responsible, then this was only a trial run to gauge efficacy. The Bronze Soldier might well have been a convenient pretext for staging an elaborate war game.

The method and organization of the attacks suggest that the perpetrators had national paralysis in mind. They targeted nearly all the Estonian ministries; two major banks (one of which, Hansabank, had to be shut down for more than an hour, at an expense of at least $1 million); the website of the Reform Party, which was forced to host a forged letter of apology for the statue scandal claiming to be from the Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip; and three of the six largest Estonian news organizations.

It's true that the "zombies," or infiltrated computers used to clog Estonian websites, were traced to places like Canada, Brazil and Vietnam. But a number also led straight into the offices of Kremlin and other Russian agencies—not easy silicon curtains to penetrate, even for the most enterprising hacker. So either Moscow was an accomplice in the criminality of its international sympathizers, or it should start worrying about the security of its own network. This isn't likely to happen. Russian officials refused to comply with early requests to help trace IP addresses of any cyber-blitzers who might have been piggybacking off Russian servers. At the very minimum, then, the Putin regime is guilty of benign neglect.

In a 2003 Military Review article addressing the proliferation of cyberwarfare—particularly as it has been waged between Israeli and Palestinian hackers—authors Patrick D. Allen and Chris C. Demchak shrewdly compared the phenomenon to the Spanish Civil War. In both instances, far-flung civilian volunteers were called into action—or "horizontally escalated"—through the use of targeted propaganda. (Russian language instructions explaining how and when to infiltrate Estonian systems were posted all over the web in the days leading up to the first sortie.) State sponsorship was plausibly deniable: If the Comintern could control the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, what's to stop a government from either openly or covertly corralling citizen "hacktivists" to do its dirty work? Most ominous of all, the event may be taken as a prelude to a later and more devastating assault, involving a greater number of players.

Pentagon computers had sensitive information pilfered from them by Russian computers in 2003 during a cyber-attack known as "Moonlight Maze." And in 1999, during an operation dubbed "Titan Rain," Chinese hackers broke into systems at Lockheed Martin, Redstone Arsenal, and NASA under similar motives of military espionage. Yet international law has yet to catch up with technology. According to Allen and Demchak:

Criminal punishment is particularly difficult when the hackers operate from a blatantly hostile nation. However, nations have certain rights under an internationally recognized protective principle if offending nations are not helpful. There is international case law, albeit limited, that might support state action in response to cyber attacks. Under this principle, when a person from country A harms country B, and country A does not prevent that person from continuing to do harm, then country B has the right to take action against country A... Although this principle has not yet been applied in cyberwar cases, the legal precedence exists.

Leo Tolstoy once described the Tsarist system as "Ghengis Khan with a telegraph." Given the communications conquest of recent weeks, cyber warfare is almost certainly going to be a continuing threat. The West should start laying the groundwork to deal with coordinated, state-sponsored cyber attacks before they happen again, and on a larger scale.

Michael Weiss is an associate editor of Jewcy and a contributor to Slate, The New Criterion and The Weekly Standard. His blog is Snarksmith.

Russia Conquers the North Pole

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 14:42:00 EDT

Could this be the basis for a new Cold War? (Thanks, I'll be here all week, remember to tip your waitress....)

From the International Herald Tribune:

A Russian expedition traveled Thursday in a pair of submersibles more than four kilometers under the ice cap and deposited a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole, making a symbolic claim to vast fields of oil and natural gas believed to be beneath the sea north of the Arctic Circle.
........
Inside the first of the minisubmarines to reach the sea floor were two members of Russia's lower house of Parliament, one of whom, Artur Chilingarov, had led the expedition to seek evidence reinforcing Russia's claim over the largely uncharted domain.
That claim, which has no current legal standing, rests on a Russian assertion that the seabed under the pole, called the Lomonosov Ridge, is an extension of Russia's continental shelf, and thus is Russian territory.
Russia submitted its claim in 2001 to an international commission, which has thus far ruled that the available data is not sufficient to support it. But Russia has pressed on.

..............
The day's events underscored both Russia's restored sense of confidence and the international competition for access, influence and extraction rights in the far north, which has intensified as oil and gas prices have surged and as trends in global warming have encouraged speculation that the region could become more navigable and accessible.
Five countries - Canada, Denmark, Norway Russia and the United States - have territory in the Arctic Circle and under international convention have rights to economic zones within 320 kilometers, or 200 miles, of their borders.

Cathy Young wondered last month here at reason why Bush isn't tougher on Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin.

UPDATE: And our own Jesse Walker last week blogged this exact same story! Life is long, memory sometimes too short, and I was away from my computer that day.....

The Kremlin's "Love Oasis"

jblanks@reason.com (Jonathan Blanks) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 14:37:00 EDT

Facing a dwindling population crisis, Vladimir Putin has created a program eerily similar to the Hitler Youth movement:

Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where [young Russian couples] can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation - known as "Nashi", meaning "Ours" - is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.
Nashi's annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Complete with veiled racist overtones, the organization resembles the Sturmabteilung (SA) and its intimidation tactics before WWII:

The group's leaders insist that the only connection to officialdom is loyalty to the president. If so, they seem remarkably well-informed.

In July 2006, the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, infuriated the Kremlin by attending an opposition meeting. For months afterwards, he was noisily harassed by groups of Nashi supporters demanding that he "apologise". With uncanny accuracy, the hooligans knew his movements in advance - a sign of official tip-offs.

Even when Nashi flagrantly breaks the law, the authorities do not intervene. After Estonia enraged Russia by moving a Soviet era war memorial in April, Nashi led the blockade of Estonia's Moscow embassy. It daubed the building with graffiti, blasted it with Stalin era military music, ripped down the Estonian flag and attacked a visiting ambassador's car. The Moscow police, who normally stamp ruthlessly on public protest, stood by.
...
Yet, by comparison with other outfits, Nashi looks relatively civilised. Its racism and prejudice is implied, but not trumpeted. Other pro-Kremlin youth groups are hounding gays and foreigners off the streets of Moscow. Mestnye [The Locals] recently distributed leaflets urging Muscovites to boycott non-Russian cab drivers.
These showed a young blonde Russian refusing a ride from a swarthy, beetle-browed taxi driver, under the slogan: "We're not going the same way."
Such unofficial xenophobia matches the official stance. On April 1, a decree explicitly backed by Mr Putin banned foreigners from trading in Russia's retail markets. By some estimates, 12 [million] people are working illegally in Russia.

Put mildly, this movement toward fascism in Russia is troubling. It is also disturbing that this story is not making more headlines here in the States.

Gorby, Corporate Shill

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 12:42:00 EDT

Mikhail Gorbachev, star of the Wim Wenders film Faraway, So Close, is moving from acting into modeling high-end luggage. The New York Times reports:

So many fashion ads feature celebrities now that it isn't even faintly jarring to flip through the August issue of Vogue and see Scarlett Johansson lying on her belly with a Louis Vuitton bag over her shoulder and 10 pages later find her flat on her back, her cascading blond hair spread to promote L'Oréal Superior Preference shade No. 10NB. That said, what is a reader to make of a Vuitton ad, coming in the big September books, that stars Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union? A decade ago, Mr. Gorbachev's appearance in a Pizza Hut commercial was generally greeted as a low point in his career.

Unelected leader of a totalitarian country for six years and pizza pitchman is considered a career "low point"? Nothing worse than selling out, I suppose.

While Gorbachev surely deserves credit for the twin reforms of perestroika and glasnost (though he is often greatly overpraised), he, of course, never lost his fondness for that particularly Russian brand of authoritarianism. When asked what he thought of Putin's Soviet nostalgia, Gorby wasn't prepared to criticize the former KGB man: "Sure thing, there are some shortcomings and negative trends. Democracy is a good thing, no doubt about. But the government should satisfy the basic needs of the citizens - that's a top priority. If authoritarianism is required to do the job, I'm ready to give my full support to this kind of authoritarianism."

As Jesse Walker recently pointed out, reason contributing editor Matt Welch wrote a terrific column on Gorbachev's authoritarian instincts:

Things at lunch were amicable until I asked the former Pizza Hut pitchman whether he thought there was anything factual behind the persistent reporting in the west that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been backsliding away from democracy. Gorbachev's smile disappeared, his eyes narrowed to lumps of burning coal, and for the next 10 minutes or so he barked out an angry lecture defending Putin and savaging the United States for working actively to humiliate Russia and make her experiments with democracy and capitalism fail. (For an illustrative list of Gorbachev's nationalist paranoia and Putin apologia, click here.)

All terrible, sure. But that corporate shill stuff...

Russians Invade the North Pole

jwalker@reason.com (Jesse Walker) — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 10:48:00 EDT

Further evidence that we live in a pulp fiction novel:

Russia is sending a mini-submarine to explore the ocean floor below the North Pole and find evidence to support its claims to Arctic territory.

Two parliamentarians, including veteran explorer Artur Chilingarov, are part of a team planning to dive 4,200m (14,000ft) below the Arctic Ocean on Sunday....

Reports say it will also leave behind a Russian flag and a capsule with a message for future generations.

"The Arctic is ours and we should demonstrate our presence," Mr Chilingarov told Russian TV.

According to the BBC's report, the Law of the Sea Treaty allows states to extend their aquatic claims when "the structure of the continental shelf is similar to the geological structure within its territory." The sub crew hopes to prove the underwater Lomonosov Ridge fits the bill, thus allowing Russia to claim the ocean's oil, gas, and mineral reserves. But if Moscow wants to take the pole, it will have to contend with more than mere international law. Just wait til Santa's elfin mujahideen turn the Arctic into Putin's Afghanistan...

The "Sovereign Democrat's" Summer Camp

mmoynihan@reason.com (Michael C. Moynihan) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 14:14:00 EDT

The creeping Sovietization of Russia continues apace. Last week, the Washington Post revealed that ~~Politburo supremo~~ President Vladimir "Dzerzhinsky" Putin had inserted himself into the country's primary school text books, assuring his subjects that he is, in fact, responsible for inventing democracy and that, all things considered, Uncle Joe wasn't a half bad leader:

The history guide contains a laudatory review of President Vladimir Putin's years in power. "We see that practically every significant deed is connected with the name and activity of President V.V. Putin," declares its last chapter. The social studies guide is marked by intense hostility to the United States.
Both books reflect the themes dominating official political discourse here: that Putin restored Russian strength and built what the Kremlin calls a "sovereign democracy" despite American efforts to isolate the country.
...
"Sovereign Democracy" is the title of one of the history manual's chapters. The term was coined by Kremlin strategist Vladislav Surkov, who attended the launch of the two books at a teachers' conference in Moscow last month. Supporters of the president use the phrase to describe the centralization of power under Putin as essential to the building of a stable Russian state, free from outside interference.
...
A textbook that took an unflinching look at Stalin's policies, including his nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany in 1939 and the mass deportation of Chechens and other Caucasians during World War II, was pulled by education officials in 2003.
...
According to the new history manual, Stalin was brutal but also "the most successful leader of the U.S.S.R."

The AP reports on the rise of the Komsomol-ish Putin summer camp—learn woodworking, poison-tipped umbrella making and polonium-handling for Mother Russia:

Ten thousand young commissars - their title borrowed from the Communist Party leaders of the Soviet era - came here to learn to be Russia's next generation of tycoons and political leaders. Equally important, they came to prepare to stamp out any challenge from opposition groups to President Vladimir Putin's government.

Finally, a place for Camp Wo-Chi-Ca alumni to send their kids.

Back in April, reason's Cathy Young discussed the censorious media climate in Putin's Russia.

Bush's Strange Romance

CathyYoung63@aol.com (Cathy Young) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 15:03:00 EDT

In June 2001, when George W. Bush held his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, he famously declared that he had "looked the man in the eye" and "was able to get a sense of his soul," in which he evidently saw only good things untainted by years of KGB service. This beginning of a beautiful friendship was reportedly aided by Putin's touching story of a cross which he received from his mother and which miraculously survived a fire at his summer cottage. (As one of Russia's surviving liberal commentators, Yulia Latynina, has noted, if Bush had belonged to a different faith Putin would no doubt have shared an equally touching tale about "a piece of advice given by a wise rabbi.")

In the six years since then, much has happened in Russia: first and foremost, a steady and brutal rollback of the freedoms gained since the start of glasnost in the late 1980s. Independent television has been obliterated; most of radio and the print press have been muzzled as well. The multiparty system has become an unfunny joke. Vocal critics of Putin have ended up in prison and, in several notorious cases, suspiciously dead. What's more, Russia, an ostensible ally in the War on Terror, has used this alliance mostly to justify its military's atrocities in Chechnya while refusing to back the U.S. on a wide range of foreign policy issues (mostly notably on sanctions against Iran). Anti-American hysteria has been rampant in the servile Russian press. In his speech last May commemorating Russia's victory over Germany, Putin transparently suggested that the United States was seeking world domination in the same manner as the Third Reich.

Meanwhile, the beautiful friendship endures.

Earlier this month, Putin visited Bush in Kennebunkport, Maine for a meeting that news reports described as intended to "work on their personal relationship." In addition to informal talks, the visit included a speedboat ride and a dinner in the company of Laura Bush—as well as, presumably, more soulful gazing into eyes.

One of the strongest reactions to this meeting came from Marina Litvinenko, widow of the mysteriously poisoned defector and fierce Putin foe Alexander Litvinenko, and the deceased's close friend Alexander Goldfarb (the co-authors of a book about the murder). In a letter to the New York Times, Litvinenko and Goldfarb wrote that by inviting Putin to dinner, "President Bush helped repair the damage that Mr. Putin's reputation suffered after the murder of Alexander V. Litvinenko." Litvinenko and Goldfarb point out that the murdered man himself named Putin as his murderer on his deathbed, which is not exactly conclusive. It is far from certain that Putin himself ordered Litvinenko's death. But his arrogant response to the British investigation into the death is bad enough. Less than a month before his meeting with Bush, Putin brushed off the formal British request to extradite the principal suspect, Russian businessman and former KGB man Andrei Lugovoi, as "stupidity."

Such arrogance is par for the course for Putin, whose only comment on charges that investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered on the Kremlin's orders was to dismiss Politkovskaya's work as insignificant and to say that "this murder does much more harm to Russia and Chechnya than any of her publications."

In other recent dispatches from Putin's Russia, a crackdown on independent political websites has already begun, supplemented by a wave of cyber-attacks on sites critical of the government. (Russia has refused to cooperate in the investigation of similar, well-organized attacks on Estonian government websites following a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Estonia over the latter's removal of a monument to Soviet soldiers.) And on Sunday, the New York Times ran a frightening front-page story on Russia's officially sponsored youth movement, Nashi ("Our Guys"), marked by fanatical devotion to the person of Vladimir Putin, nationalist and socially conservative values, and hatred of the opposition. Nashi, which violently besieged the Estonian embassy in Moscow during the dispute over the monument and held pickets that forced a regional governor to apologize for inviting a member of an opposition party to attend a youth conference, is now reportedly conducting paramilitary training with the intent of "challenging those who take to the streets to protest the Kremlin."

The hardening of the Kremlin line is widely seen as a prelude to the 2008 presidential elections. Despite Putin's vows not to seek a third term, prohibited under Russia's constitution, many Kremlin watchers expect him to stay in one way or another. Two years ago, when Putin loyalists began a push to amend the constitution to lift the two-term limit, British reporter Adrian Blomfield wrote in The Telegraph that "the main factor deterring Mr. Putin from changing the constitution is the fear of the likely cool response from the West." But just how much of a fear is that? Neither the Litvinenko murder and the Kremlin's cynical response to it nor the slow murder of freedom in Russia have made Putin any less welcome in the West's polite society—as Vlad's Sunday in Kennebunkport with George amply demonstrates.

The United States cannot, of course, break off relations with Russia. But for the President of the United States—who, whatever one may think of him personally, holds the highest office in the most powerful country of the free world—to embrace the president of today's authoritarian Russia as a friend is to give moral sanction to a regime that shows blatant contempt for democratic and civilized norms.

Cathy Young is a contributing editor of reason.

Discuss this article online.