July 20, 2008 -- Contents

SUNDAY JULY 20 CONTENTS

(1) The Sunday Photos

(2) The Sunday Stalin

(3) The Sunday Religious War

(4) The Sunday Scandal

(5) The Sunday Funnies

The Sunday Photos

Russian blogger Savva Terentyev, upon learning he would be sentenced to a year in prison (suspended) for writing a comment on a blog the authorities didn't like, and below him the "judge" who issued that sentence in a decision that was ridiculed as being quasi-literate. Global Voices has the wrap-up and a review of Russian blog postings on the subject including the pathetically cowardly statements of Russia's #1 blogger Anton Nossik, who merely says he'd prefer the police catch violent criminals rather than scouring the blogosphere.

EDITORIAL: Russia and Stalin, the Love Affair Continues

EDITORIAL

Russia and Stalin: The Love Affair Continues

Police in Nizhny Novgorod have arrested a man who shot dead two pet parrots after his wife refused to buy him beer, news agencies reported.When his wife refused to go to the shop, the man became enraged, seized an air pistol and opened fire on the two birds, which were inside a cage, Interfax reported, citing a regional police official. No humans were harmed in the incident.

-- Moscow Times, July 18 2008

Russia is an insane country where, as in the mafia, people really believe they can simply demand respect rather than earning it, killing anyone who fails to deliver, and the above news item perfectly encapsulates that insanity. Both Tsarist Russia and Communist Russia collapsed, in the space of just one century, because of this crazy, self-destructive obliviousness to reality. There are others, too many others to count.

Last week for instance there were dozens of news stories about a contest now underway on state-sponsored Russian TV to identify Russia's greatest historical figure. In internet voting, Russians were having great difficulty deciding who their #1 choice was -- the dictator Nicholas II or the mass-murdering dictator Josef Stalin. When voting was suspended "for technical reasons" on Wednesday, Nicholas II had received 275,065 votes and Stlalin had 273,877 votes. In the third place was Vladimir Lenin with a paltry 188,372 votes. As the Wall Street Journal reported: "Stalin took an early and large lead in the contest but was narrowly overtaken by Nicholas II on Monday as thousands of monarchists and anti-communists organized an anti-Stalin 'clickathon.' Nikolai Lukyanov, chairman of a large monarchist group, said a Stalin victory would shame Russia internationally. He said the 'clickathon' was organized to show that Russians 'are no lover of Stalin, disgrace and blood.'"

In effect, though, Lukhyanov was lying. The "clickathon" was organized to hide the fact that Russians love Stalin, disgrace and blood, not to alter that reality. Russia's leading opposition politician, the Communist Party's Gennady Zyuganov, stated proudly that if Stalin were back in charge of the country he could solve it's problems "in one day." Imagine Germany's main opposition leader saying that about Hitler.

We believe it's clear that the online voting dramatically understates Stalin's popularity in Russia, and not only because of Lukyanov's manipulation of the vote (a measure Stalin would have, ironically, heartily approved). Only about 10% of Russia's population has any access to the Internet, and those who can routinely utilize it are few and far between. Netherlands, a tiny country nearly 1/10 Russia's size, has almost as many Internet users. So in other words, no internet vote can accurately capture the true attitudes of the people of Russia.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, and as we have routinely done: "New textbooks hail Stalin as an effective manager, and TV documentaries stress his achievements and alleged selflessness." In the Russian people's defense, one might point out that they simply don't know that Stalin's "victory" in World War II, the main reason he receives such adulation, has a few dirty secrets:

• Stalin caused the war in the first place

• Though "defeated" the Nazi army obliterated huge swaths of Russia, hobbling it forever

• As bad as the Nazi army was, Stalin was far worse, murdering more Russians in his "gulag archipelago" than Hitler ever dreamed of doing. The Wall Street Journal reported: "Sergey Kovalyov, a former dissident who spent seven years in Soviet labor camps and three years in internal exile in Siberia, said the popularity of Stalin was "very sad. How many people did he take away?" said Mr. Kovalyov, his voice trailing off.
  

But in the end, the Russian people's jaw-droppingly barbaric ignorance of their own history is their own fault. They chose to look the other way at Stalin's atrocities while they were happening. They either watched passively as their neighbors were taken away or they collaborated and informed on them, rather than rising up to strike down Stalin as they had done with Hitler. They willingly allowed Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, to take and hold permanent dictatorial power even after watching that same organization break Russia's spine and drive it to its knees.

Indeed, given the Stalin vote it's not hard to understand why Putin himself remains so popular in Russia.

The Sunday Religious War

The blogger at Take Your Cross directs our attention to the following article by Andrei Smirnov in the Jamestown Foundation's North Caucus Weekly:

From July 5 to July 7, an international Islamic conference entitled “The Place and Role of Sufism in the Islamic World,” which gathered together more than 200 clergymen from Russia and other countries, was held in the Chechen town of Gudermes. According to official sources, the event was organized by the Libya-based World Islamic People’s Leadership organization (Interfax, July 1). The event, however, was most likely financed by the Russian government. The Kremlin seeks support from international Sufi leaders to counter the aggressive Salafi ideology that inspires the anti-Russian insurgency in the North Caucasus.

Sufism is a mysterious branch of Islam whose main idea is that a Muslim in his lifetime should concentrate on improving his moral principles while the social environment around him is not so important. At the opposite side of the spectrum, the disciples of the Salafi branch of Islam believe that all Muslims compose one Umma (society) that should be united as one political force and live according to Islamic Sharia law. The separatists in the North Caucasus very often justify their armed struggle by the fact that Caucasian Muslims live in a country ruled by non-Muslims (Russians). Salafists are usually very hostile to non-Muslim societies.

It is no surprise that the Russian authorities prefer to deal with and support Sufi disciples and not Salafi preachers. The conference in Gudermes was just another attempt to strengthen Sufism in Chechnya, where Salafism has become very popular recently, especially among the Chechen youth. In an address to the conference participants, Chechnya’s pro-Russian president, Ramzan Kadyrov, said that the “spiritual and moral ideals of Sufism are directly connected with the acknowledgment of monotheism, with the perception of the multitudinous attributes of the Most-High, with spiritual perfection, with the purification of a believer’s heart from evil, with condemnation of luxury and social injustice, with equality and human brotherhood” (Vesti-Severny Kavkaz, July 7). The conference adopted a resolution stating that “for many Muslim peoples spiritual knowledge of Sufism is part of their culture” and that the spiritual knowledge of Sufism is directed toward the “establishment of tolerant relations between people and helps to block radical and extremist developments” (Vesti-Severny Kavkaz, July 7).

Thus, the participants of the conference did not hide their main goal: to find ways to confront Salafism effectively. “The conference was an important event to unite all healthy elements of the traditional Islam that opposes radical Islamic distortions of the true faith,” said Ruslan Saidov, a political observer and unofficial ideologist for Kadyrov’s regime. Saidov sees Sufism as an ideological basis for national and state construction in Chechnya (forum.msk.ru, July 4).

The Kremlin regards Sufism as an ideal alternative to Salafism because Sufism agitates for non-violent methods, does not interfere with politics and helps to divide Russian Muslims, especially in the North Caucasus, according to ethnic characteristics. The North Caucasian insurgency has the opposite goal: to unite Muslims living in the Caucasus with those living in all Russia under a banner of the holy war against infidels and for establishing a pure Islamic state. The rebels in the North Caucasus recently gained an important ally—the famous Russian Muslim preacher Said Buryatsky.

Half ethnic Russian, half Buryat (the Buryats are a minority in Siberia very close to the Mongols), Sheik Said Buryatsky graduated from an Islamic Institute in Egypt several years ago. According to Jamestown’s sources among Moscow Muslims, Buryatsky’s main spiritual teacher in Egypt was Sheikh Mukhammad Khasan, an Egyptian scholar who issued his own fatwa (religious ruling) concerning defensive and offensive Jihad (holy war). According to his fatwa, a defensive Jihad requires every Muslim to defend any Muslim land against infidel aggression while an offensive Jihad is not obligatory.

Some people say that while studying in Egypt, Said Buryatsky was arrested once by the Egyptian police on charges of extremism. Despite this fact, Buryatsky became one of the leading young Muslim preachers after his return to Russia. Russia’s Muslim community lacks good preachers and Buryatsky has demonstrated good skills as a religious missionary. His emotional sermons are well-constructed, and his knowledge of the Koran and religious literature in general is exceptional. He also speaks fluent Arabic.

Said Buryatsky used to preach on Radio Islam (which is controlled by the Spiritual Directorate of Russian Muslims and is the main source of propaganda for Islam in Russia). It is astonishing that the Russian authorities allowed Said to preach on the radio for such a long time because some of his sermons sounded clearly Salafi-like. In his sermons, Buryatsky targeted Shias as well as Sufis, calling them people who distort the true Islam. The official Muslim clerics probably overlooked this simply because they needed a preacher as brilliant as Said Buryatsky.

However, Buryatsky suddenly appeared in Chechnya accompanied by two top rebel leaders of the Caucasian insurgency: Dokka Umarov and Supyan Abdulaev. In a video posted by the rebel Kavkaz-Center website on June 19, Buryatsky stated that after the declaration of a Caucasian Emirate (see Chechnya Weekly, November 1 and 8, 2007) it became clear that the Emirate is what Russian Muslims really need and that all Muslims should support it. Buryatsky called Dokka Umarov “our amir”—meaning “our leader.”

Buryatsky’s appearance in Chechnya and the recent conference of Sufis in Guderemes demonstrate the important role that religion has started to play in the Chechen conflict, which back in the early 1990s appeared to be simply a political dispute between the federal center and one of Russia’s regions.

The Sunday Scandal

Harpers reports:

Back in January of 2007, the House Ethics Committee (“Press 1 if you are a member of Congress covering up a criminal offense. Press 2 if…”) released a statement saying that it had reviewed a foreign trip by Congressman Curt Weldon and determined that he had violated the gift rule ban. Weldon, said the statement–which was signed by Republican Doc Hastings, then the Committee chairman, and Howard Berman, then the ranking Democrat–had traveled in January 2003 with “several” unnamed family members. “Donors,” who were also not identified, picked up the tab for much of the trip, said the committee. The statement also failed to disclose where precisely Weldon & Co. had traveled, but did say that Weldon had been told to reimburse the trip’s financial sponsors for some $23,000 in expenses.

So where did Curt Weldon go? I’ve learned that he traveled to Eastern Europe (stops included Moscow and Vienna) with 10 family members and acquaintances, including one son’s girlfriend and a daughter’s boyfriend. The trip was paid for by three private foreign groups, including a Russian aerospace manufacturer and members of a controversial Serbian family that were barred from entering the United States due to their alleged ties to accused war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. Very soon after the trip the Russian firm and the Serbian family retained Karen Weldon, the congressman’s young, politically inexperienced daughter, to be their Washington lobbyist–which led to charges about whether her father was steering business to her that are currently the subject of a federal investigation.

This was all known to the Ethics Committee when it released its statement in January of 2007. As is inevitably the case, the committee opted to cover up for one of its own as opposed to holding members of congress accountable.

According to the Committee’s statement and other evidence I have obtained, prior to traveling Weldon had disclosed his trip and sought a waiver from the gift-rule provisions that at the time permitted a member of Congress to accept “travel and other benefits resulting from outside activities that are unrelated to official duties.” Weldon argued that his trip was unrelated to official duties, because the invitation to travel to Eastern Europe (to give a speech) was made on the basis of his membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences–not because he was a member of Congress. Even the typically lame Ethics Committee rejected that argument, recognizing (for obvious reasons we’ll soon see) that the trip was connected to Weldon’s position as a member of Congress. So Weldon, according to the January 2007 statement, “then sought a gift rule waiver from the Committee, but withdrew his request prior to receiving a formal written response from the Committee.”

In other words, Weldon apparently didn’t get the answer he wanted so he simply ignored the committee’s advice and ethics rules and went anyway, with the tab being picked up by outside sponsors.

In January of 2003, the Weldon clan headed to Eastern Europe. In addition to the congressman, the travelers included his wife, his three daughters, two sons, one son-in-law, a niece and two other people, whose identities were apparently known to the committee but were not revealed. I’ve learned that those two people were the girlfriend of son Andrew Weldon and the boyfriend of daughter Karen Weldon, who at the time was embarking on a lucrative career as a lobbyist (though a short-lived career, interrupted in October of 2006 by a federal raid on her offices).

So the Weldon clan departed to Moscow, and the Moscow International Petroleum Club, “a non-profit international organization, with membership of over 25 leading Russian, European, and American oil and gas production and service companies committed to doing business in Russia,” picked up about $12,000 in planes fares and hotel lodging.

Other stops in Russia included the Saratov Aviation Plant, a company building a flying saucer, whose technology Congressman Weldon was aggressively pushing in Washington. Saratov paid for roughly $4,000 of airfare, which included flights from Moscow to the plant and then from the plant to Belgrade. Soon after this visit, Karen Weldon closed a deal with Saratov to lobby for the firm in Washington.

In Belgrade, the Weldon family stayed at a private residence owned by the controversial Karic family. As I wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2004:

Because of evidence that the Karics had supported Milosevic, the Treasury Department placed them on a list of Serbians banned from doing business in the United States. They all had been removed from the list by last year, as the United States normalized relations with Serbia, but they still cannot get visas.

In a written statement, a spokesman for the Karics said, “Regarding the alleged links of the Karic Group or family to the Milosevic regime, we can only reiterate that these allegations are the product of groups or individuals from our country who have been themselves profiting from ties with the former regime.” Rep. Weldon came to adopt the view that the Karics, whose businesses thrived under Milosevic, were being unfairly portrayed as sympathizers of the former leader.

From Belgrade, the Weldon clan traveled to Vienna. The roughly $7,000 in airfare was picked up by the Karic Group. In March 2003, two months after this trip, the Karic Foundation hired Karen Weldon’s firm on a renewable one-year contract paying $240,000 to help it in “establishing and developing a U.S. presence.”

The Ethics Committee’s limp, pathetic response to this egregiousness came in January 2007–two months after Weldon had lost his House seat. The Committee essentially protected one of their own up until the point that it was irrelevant. Furthermore, Weldon had during the campaign claimed–falsely, as the statement shows–that he had been fully investigated and cleared of any wrongdoing by the committee. By not releasing the statement until months after he had lost his House seat, the committee allowed then-Congressman Weldon to lie.

Finally, the Committee had determined that it would not take any action over charges that Weldon had steered business to daughter Karen’s firm. But, as is customary, the committee’s investigation was largely limited to reviewing information submitted by Weldon’s own office. Imagine how many convictions we’d get if the police limited their investigations to data provided by suspects, yet that’s the way our Congress works.

(This also makes it easy to understand this story from today’s Washington Post, “House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) said yesterday that he would welcome an ethics committee investigation into his fundraising efforts for an academic center that bears his name.” Yes, I can imagine the propsect of a committee investigation doesn’t keep Rangel up at night.)

Weldon’s attorney, William Winning, did not reply to a request for comment about the trip, nor to a question about whether Weldon ever in fact paid the money back. If he does reply, I will update this story immediately.

The Sunday Funnies

Source: Ellustrator.

July 18, 2008 -- Contents

FRIDAY JULY 18 CONTENTS

(1) EDITORIAL: The New Adventures of the Buchanan Brigades

(2) Russia, Hitting Below the Belt (as Usual)

(3) The True Horror of Russia's Real Inflation Rate

(4) Latynina: The FSB Blues

(5) Formalizing the Putin Dictatorship

(6) Americans and Georgians, Shoulder to Shoulder

EDITORIAL: The New Adventures of the Buchanan Brigades

EDITORIAL

The New Adventures of the Buchanan Brigades

The International Herald Tribune, a subsidiary of the New York Times, has an editorial page helmed by one Serge Schmemann, a demonic individual whom La Russophobe has repeatedly taken to task for misleading statements about Vladimir Putin’s Russia that give him all the appearance of a neo-Soviet collaborator.

Schmemann, who regularly publishes diatribes about Russia in the Times itself, has written in regard to Russia’s most recent elections, comparing them to those in Soviet times: “Anyone who followed the serial transitions of the final act of the Soviet Union -- Brezhnev-Andropov- Chernenko-Gorbachev -- leader ever left office voluntarily.” So Putin voluntarily left office and is to be lauded as a democrat! The minor matter of remaining in power as prime minister and making state visits to countries like France where he’s treated as if nothing had changed, because it hasn’t, means nothing.

Isn’t this exactly how we got in trouble with Hitler?

Perhaps Schmemann’s pièce de résistance, though, came on July 1, when his paper published a trilogy of editorials on Russia penned a set of the most bedraggled Russophilic scoundrels that could be imagined. First came the seething Russian nationalist and racist Dmitri Rogozin, identified for the lay reader only as “Russia's ambassador to NATO.” Then came politics professor Stephen Cohen of NYU, he who regularly spews out Chamberlain-like calls for appeasement of Russia in the rancid pages of his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel’s left-wing extremist screed The Nation (Professor Cohen, too, has been regularly roasted for his misstatements on my blog). And then to round things out the IHT offered us none other than the doddering Henry Kissenger, desperate to carve out some sort of limelight for himself in his dotage, rehabilitating himself from the Nixon taint and all those rumors about being a war criminal, by telling us he can fix up everything for us with Putin, only a few knowing whispers and smiles being needed.

All three of them screeched a chorus of conciliation with the Putin dictatorship; not a single tough critic of Putin was invited to the party. This is what passes for tolerance and diversity on the pages of the Gray Lady these days. As Kim Zigfeld reported on Pajamas a few months ago, when Putin first came to power the Times was just as full of hope for his potential as this terrifying triumvirate is about him now, and acknowledgement of wrongdoing has been conspicuously absent from its pages in recent years.

And what passes for liberalism. Not one of the three called for us to stand up for democracy or human rights in Russia. None mentioned the purge of all opposition parties from the Russian parliament and all opposition candidates from the most recent presidential race, including former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov. None mentioned the convictions for state-sponsored murder in Chechnya or the unsolved murder of hero journalist Anna Politkovskaya or the litany of other political murders that have occurred on Putin’s watch. None could recall the show trial and Siberian exile of Mikhail Khodorkovsky. All seemed to feel that Putin’s spate of strategic bomber overflights of Western targets, his provision of weapons to Iran and Venezuela, his support of Hamas and Hezbollah were all just the temper tantrums of a neglected child who would coo and fawn if only showered with kindly attention.

And worst of all, none considered even for a moment that the proud KGB spy who rules Russia with an iron hand might possibly bear us permanent ill will for destroying the USSR, that he might believe the USSR’s condemnation of American freedom and democracy was legitimate, that he might only be biding his time until he could lash out at us in revenge. According to each of them, Putin is just a misunderstood little puppy, who only messes on the carpet and nips at our heels because he hasn’t been given enough attention and kibble. Little do they realize that Russians find this patronization far more offensive than confrontation, nor do they imagine how Putin is grinning from ear to ear as he listens to the drumbeat of appeasement.

If we had been whipped in the Cold War by Russia, is that what we would have done? Given up on freedom and democracy, and adopted totalitarian communism just so long as we received the proper amount of friendly respect from our Soviet overlords?

Not long ago, Pajamas Media contributor Sheryl Longin issued a stinging condemnation of the lunatic Pat Buchanan’s worldview aptly headlined “Buchanan Lied, People Died.” Buchanan, too, is a big fan of “being reasonable” with Putin. Buchanan says that “our next president will likely face a Russia led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, determined to stand up to a West that Russians believe played them for fools when they sought to be friends.” He writes: “The hubris of Bill Clinton and George Bush II [Pat actually writes Bush I, but later he say that Bush I and Ronald Reagan had converted Russia into an ally, so apparently it's a typo], and the Russophobia of those they brought with them into power, has been a primary cause of the ruptured relationship. And the folly of what they did is evident today, as Putin's party, United Russia, rolls to triumph on a torrent of abuse and invective against the West.”

So the fact that Putin purged the electoral rolls of all legitimate opposition parties and rigged the subsequent vote shamelessly (in some regions, like Chechnya, United Russia scored over 99% of the ballots) means nothing. The fact that Putin is a proud KGB spy steeped in anti-democratic hostility means nothing. The only thing that counts is what Pat thinks, and Pat thinks Pooty-Poot is just swell, and the only problem is that we are provoking him.

That’s right – the New York Times and Pat Buchanan are on the same page. Can you conceive of anything more disturbing? By contrast, the Washington Post is a shining example of a genuine effort to defend so-called “liberal” values in Russia. In recent weeks, the Post has published stunning op-ed pieces by leading dissident figure Oleg Kozlovsky and firebrand journalist Yulia Latynina, the heir apparent to Politikovskaya. The Times hasn’t even run a news story about Kozlovsky’s repeated illegal, politically-motivated arrests.

The appallingly misleading character of the Cohen-Kissenger-Rogozin axis can perhaps best be seen in the fact that the Cohen column was bizarrely and inexplicably appearing in the IHT for the second time. It was published on May 2, 2008, under the headline “Russia, the Missing Debate” and then again on July 1^st under the lead “Wrong on Russia.” Both columns contained the following Cohenism verbatim:

In the U.S. policy elite and media, the nearly unanimous answer is that Russian President Vladimir Putin's antidemocratic domestic policies and "neo-imperialism" destroyed that historic opportunity. You don't have to be a Putin apologist to understand that this is not an adequate explanation.

You don’t have to be an apologist, no, but it certainly does make things much simpler. How it could be possible that the paper would publish the same article twice without notifying readers defies imagination. How it could be so pathologically obsessed with rationalizing Putin’s rule is not that difficult to understand, however, not if you’ve been a regular follower of Schmemann’s own writing or the New York Times’ consistent pathology of appeasement.

We wrote to IHT to ask them about the double publication. Their curt reply: “The Cohen article was published a second time in error. The mistake was corrected in later editions of our print edition.” They apparently feel no need to make any notation of the issue on the web page that contains the second publication. Then, an act of naked dishonesty, they simply killed the July 1st link, as if it had never happened.

Isn’t this how Jayson Blair got started?

Russia, Hitting Below the Belt (as Usual)

Andrei Soldatov, of Novaya Gazeta and Agentura.ru, writing in the Moscow Times:

The latest round in a boxing match between Russia's and Britain's secret services began on July 4, when an article appeared in the British press quoting the MI5 counterespionage unit as saying that the number of Russian spies flooding the country had made Russia the third-greatest threat to Britain after Iran and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, in the Daily Mail, Member of Parliament Andrew MacKinley was accused of meeting too frequently with Alexander Polyakov, a counselor at the Russian Embassy who the MI5 suspects reports to Russian intelligence.

But that was only the beginning. On the BBC "Newsnight" program on July 7, an anonymous MI5 source stated that the agency considers the Russian government responsible for the poisoning death in London of former Federal Security Service agent Alexander Litvinenko and for the attempted murder of self-exiled billionaire Boris Berezovsky.

The Kremlin retaliated in a statement to RIA-Novosti on Thursday, when a source with the Federal Security Service claimed that Chris Bowers, the British Embassy's director of trade and finance, was a British intelligence agent.

Moscow's aggressive reaction underscores just how different the two countries' methods are in the prolonged conflict. For the past year, the British government has limited its reactions to political statements protesting Litvinenko's death, while Moscow has used more blunt instruments.

The British have initiated only one spy scandal in the past few years. In fall 2007, a former British Army cadet, Peter Hill, was arrested in Leeds. But this was a case of pure provocation. The cadet had written a letter to the Russian Embassy offering cooperation, but it was intercepted by the MI5. A British agent posing as a Russian intelligence operative named Andrei met with Hill in a cafe. The result: Hill spent a few months in jail, but all charges were later dropped. It is clear that Russian intelligence did not suffer in any way from this operation for the simple reason that it was not involved.

Britain behaved exactly the same way in the Litvinenko affair. The British prosecutor's office was careful to name only the prime suspect in the murder case, Andrei Lugovoi, but not the person or entity that ordered the killing or their possible motive. This was a deliberate attempt to avoid having to pose any awkward questions to the Kremlin.

Sanctions against Russia were limited to dissolving a commission on the struggle against terrorism -- a nonfunctioning body for all intents and purposes -- and four Russian diplomats were expelled from London in July 2007. But this was not because the Kremlin had ordered Litvinenko's murder. It was because Russia refused to extradite a Russian national to stand trial in a foreign country, something that would have violated its own Constitution.

The ensuing BBC episode did not help matters. The MI5 source offered only his opinion and not the official position of the agency. Sure enough, a few days later, a Downing Street spokesman repudiated the unidentified source and announced that MI5 did not have the authority to make official statements and that Litvinenko was killed by a single individual who should stand trial.

The problem is that Moscow -- in contrast to London -- did not constrain itself in this battle of the spies. While the British are content to complain about the number of Russian spies roaming their country, the Kremlin takes the more drastic steps of shutting down the British Council in Russia and sending FSB agents into TNK-BP. While the British suggest that one of their army cadets is getting a little too cozy with the Russian Embassy staff, the FSB delivers a knockout blow, pushing a high-ranking diplomat out of a group involved in the sensitive TNK-BP negotiations.

These differing approaches reflect the different cultures in the two countries. The British apparently feel that it is necessary to keep the door open for compromise at all times, while officials in the Kremlin consider this approach a sign of weakness. It resembles some sort of strange boxing match in which the British fighter constantly appeals to the referee and the audience, while his Russian opponent punches him repeatedly below the belt.

The True Horror of Russia's Real Inflation Rate

The Moscow Times reports that the wages of ordinary working Russians will fall by 25% in 2008 as the result of inflation -- these are folks who are already burdened by slave wages on the order of $4/hour. Remember, general inflation of just 5% is viewed in the United States as a life-threatening crisis. The price of a Mercedes or BMW is only rising at half that rate, so Russia's rich can console themselves with that fact even as their own standard of living plummets considerably.

The inflation rate for the nation's poor is set to hit 25 percent for 2008, according to a recent survey, well above the 14 percent it projected for the country as a whole.

During the first half of 2008, the cost of a minimum basket of foodstuffs rose by 20.6 percent, FBK Consulting Group said in a statement released Monday. The effect is amplified because food costs comprise 45 to 50 percent of low-income consumers' total purchases, Igor Nikolayev, FBK's director of strategic analysis, said in the statement.

"What's really notable is that the prices of the products that comprise the minimum set of foodstuffs purchased by the Russian poor are rising at the fastest rate," Nikolayev said.

The cost of the basket also rose sharply in 2007, by 22.3 percent, with a 13.1 percent increase in the first half. By contrast, from 2003 and 2006, the cost of the minimal set of foodstuffs rose an average of 10 percent per year.

The government is currently forecasting inflation at 10.5 percent for the year, although analysts and many in the government say the target will now be difficult to reach. Inflation was at an annualized 15.1 percent in June, according to the State Statistics Service.

From January to June, prices for fruit and vegetables increased by 36 percent, pasta by 26 percent, sunflower oil by 25.9 percent, bread and bakery products by 20.7 percent, and cereals by 20.4 percent, the report said.

As a result of the rising food prices, FBK said, the number of people living below the poverty line could increase in Russia for the first time since 2000 — from 18.9 million last year to 20 million people in 2008.

Other economic specialists, however, were skeptical about the deleterious effects that the price hikes would have on the poor.

"It's difficult to say how exactly inflation will affect the lower classes because we cannot say by what percentage wages will increase or decrease in the future," Alfa Bank economist Natalya Orlova said.

In addition, analysts said, if wages keep up with or rise faster than the cost of food, lower-income consumers will not be hit as hard in real terms. In June, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said the government would increase spending on wages and social benefits to serve as a cushion against rising food prices.

"It is highly likely that the government will increase wages in response to the increase in inflation," said Pavel Trunin, an analyst at the Institute for the Economy in Transition. "Because wages are currently rising at a faster rate than is inflation, the nation's poor won't be poorer."

The FSB Blues

Yulia Latynina, writing in the Moscow Times:

Things have not been going so well for our siloviki. The BBC ran an interview on July 7 with an anonymous high-ranking agent of Britain's MI5 counterespionage unit who declared that Russian authorities were behind the poisoning death in London of former Federal Secret Service agent Alexander Litvinenko.

The declaration will probably lead to a new wave of angry recriminations against foreigners, and many will be asking why this unidentified MI5 agent made these accusations during a popular BBC program. But the answer to that question is simple, albeit unpleasant, for the Kremlin: to support and defend the rule of law. In normal countries, people are not usually poisoned with polonium-210 in the heart of a major world capital, with the murderers walking away scot-free.

In another case, British spymaster Alex Allen, who is also chairman of the country's Joint Intelligence Committee, was found in a coma in his London apartment two weeks ago. British newspapers speculated that al-Qaida or the Russian secret service might be responsible for his condition.

To be honest, I don't think Russian agents could have pulled off such a major feat. They are limited to more modest and blunt operations, like blowing up a bus in Nalchik or a market in Sukhumi. But Alex Allen? Don't make me laugh. This is nonsense. An agency more accustomed to shooting down unarmed people in Nazran and then photographing the bodies with planted weapons in their hands is hardly qualified to orchestrate a sophisticated operation against an ace agent like Allen.

At the same time as these events were unfolding, the London court agreed to hear the claims of businessman Michael Cherney against oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Cherney accused Deripaska, his former business partner, of failing to pay the full price for his shares in Russian Aluminum.

I don't want to guess the outcome, but I think Cherney's claims aren't worth the paper they were written on. Cherney's industrial empire, in which Deripaska once participated, was built upon extremely informal connections between the various players. The ownership documents Cherney has in his possession, and which both he and Deripaska have signed, are quite typical for such shady transactions -- that is, they might carry some validity in the criminal world, but not in a British court of law. Nonetheless, the British court agreed to hear Cherney's case on the rationale that he was unable to obtain justice in Russia. It is truly a sad testament to the current state of affairs when a London court considers Russia's reputation as being worse than Cherney's.

They say that it takes the first half of your life to build your reputation, but during the second half, your reputation then works for you -- or against you, as the case may be. Cesare Borgia, the 15th-century Italian military commander, probably did not sleep with his sister, as has been claimed. He just sent killers to knock off her husband, and when they failed in the first attempt, Borgia ordered them to go back and try again. The second time, however, they finished off the wounded man in his bedroom, in front of Borgia's sister. Objectively speaking, Borgia was an excellent commander and a brilliant statesman, and it is unlikely that he was responsible for half of the killings attributed to him. Nonetheless, he has been stuck with a largely negative reputation.

Before Litvinenko's poisoning death, Russia had one reputation, but now it has a different one. That new reputation won't change until the murder case is investigated and brought to its full conclusion -- and until murder suspect and State Duma Deputy Andrei Lugovoi gives an honest deposition instead of giving self-promoting news conferences and television interviews.

In democracies, there are certain things that should never be bargained away or swept under the carpet. Murder is one of them.

Formalizing the Putin Dictatorship and the New Cold War

The Moscow Times reports:

President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday unveiled a new foreign policy strategy that grants unprecedented rights to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and shows that the Kremlin will maintain the tough course set during Putin's presidency.

The foreign policy strategy, signed by Medvedev on Saturday but released Tuesday to coincide with a keynote speech to ambassadors, says the prime minister will be allowed for the first time to implement foreign policy measures, a right previously assumed to be monopolized by the president.

Amid speculation that presidential powers would be weakened after Putin left the Kremlin, Medvedev said immediately after his election in March that he would retain the presidential right to control foreign policy.

A Kremlin spokesman declined to comment on the redivision of foreign policy powers Tuesday, and the Kremlin did not release further details about the prime minister's new role in foreign policy.

Other than this and several other differences, the new strategy strongly resembles one approved by then-President Putin in 2000, reiterating Russia's interest in reasserting itself as an international player in a multipolar world where UN and international law reign supreme and unilateral actions by countries like the United States are unwelcome.

"The vague and somewhat incomprehensible expectations that there might be some kind of liberalization in foreign policy" under Medvedev have proven unfounded, said Dmitry Trenin, political analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center.

Medvedev himself reiterated the continuity of Putin's foreign policy course in his Tuesday address to dozens of Russian ambassadors flown in from all corners of the world for an annual Kremlin meeting. Medvedev criticized U.S. plans to deploy parts of a missile-defense shied in Eastern Europe and Western nations' failure to ratify the revised Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe.

"This common [security] heritage cannot survive if one side selectively destroys isolated elements of the strategic regime. This does not satisfy us," Medvedev told the envoys.

Medvedev also said Russia cannot rely on oral promises by other countries on national security, in an apparent reference to the reluctance of U.S. President George W. Bush's administration to sign or extend new arms treaties or allow Russia to closely monitor its planned missile-defense shield in Eastern Europe.

The 2008 foreign policy meticulously lists Russia's grievances vis-a-vis the United States and NATO, including not only missile defense and the CFE treaty, but also NATO's plan to expand to include Georgia and Ukraine. Russia has suspended its participation in CFE after a number of NATO members failed to ratify it.

The strategy also calls for a new comprehensive security pact to be developed and adopted by European countries to prevent further erosion of existing arms controls. It also reiterates Moscow's idea to transform the U.S.-Russian Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which bans medium-range nuclear-capable missiles, into an international treaty. Previously, this proposal was considered more of a bargaining chip in negotiations with the United States over an entire spectrum of arms-control issues. The inclusion of it into the foreign policy strategy demonstrates that Moscow is serious about trying to convince other nations to scrap their medium-range missiles, which is unrealistic, said Alexander Golts, an independent defense and foreign policy analyst.

Interestingly, while the 2000 strategy devotes only two paragraphs to relations with the United States and speaks of the need to overcome "formidable differences" in relations, the new strategy elaborates much more on these ties. Despite the fact that relations have deteriorated in recent years, the new strategy speaks of "great potential" for cooperation in security, economic and other spheres and calls for "a strategic partnership." It calls for retiring "strategic principles of the past" and focusing on "real threats" while also working to resolve differences in the "spirit of mutual respect."

The new strategy strongly emphasizes the importance of international law, which should come as no surprise given Medvedev's background as a lawyer, Trenin said.

Another key difference from the 2000 strategy is that it does not refer to the long-delayed creation of the Russia-Belarus Union as a priority. The new strategy only notes that the union should be based on principles of a market economy.

The new document also does not repeat the 2000 assertion that there are "good prospects for the development of relations" with Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Instead, it refers to the European Union as a long-term economic and foreign policy partner and singles out France, Germany and Italy among the countries that Russia wants to advance relations with. It also says Russia would like to develop relations with Britain — a sign that Moscow wants to normalize ties strained by the murder of former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and the treatment of British investors at TNK-BP.

Russia in recent years has sought to develop ties with key EU member states, drawing accusations from the others that it is seeking to play EU members off one another. "The mentioning of individual countries sends a signal to the countries that are not mentioned that Russia doesn't view them" as partners because of their unfriendly conduct, Trenin said.

Significantly, the new strategy no longer implies or asserts that the Commonwealth of Independent States is a vehicle for the integration of former Soviet republics. Rather, it speaks of the importance of developing ties with individual CIS members while giving priority to integration with select neighbors, such as those in the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Eurasian Economic Commonwealth.

Unlike the old strategy, the new one also refers to the need to fight fascism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, but it identifies no countries where these phenomena need to be addressed. Both Medvedev and Putin have repeatedly accused the Baltic states of violating the rights of Russian-speaking minorities and wrongly collaborating with Nazi Germany in World War II.

Medvedev noted that his strategy also differs in its list of priorities. At the top of the list is ensuring national security, followed by creating the foreign conditions needed to modernize Russia and protect its economic rights. It also vows that Russia will not allow itself to be dragged into a new arms race that could prove devastating for the national economy.

"These two key assumptions, if observed, would lay the cornerstone for a normal foreign policy," Trenin said.

Americans and Georgians, Shoulder to Shoulder

Reuters reports further evidence on how the Putin regime has totally poisoned Russia's relations with former Soviet allies Ukraine and Georgia. This, if no other reason, justifies exorcising the Putin regime from power, yet the people of Russia stand idly by watching it happen, until they are left just as in Soviet times utterly alone in the world, hellbent on a path to utter destruction.

One thousand U.S. troops began a military training exercise in Georgia on Tuesday against a backdrop of growing friction between Georgia and neighboring Russia. Officials said the exercise, called "Immediate Response 2008," had been planned for months and was not linked to a standoff between Moscow and Tbilisi over the breakaway Georgian republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. "The main purpose of these exercises is to increase the cooperation and partnership between U.S. and Georgian forces," Brigadier General William B. Garrett, commander of the U.S. military's Southern European Task Force, told reporters.

The war games involve 600 Georgian troops and smaller numbers from the former Soviet republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine. The two-week exercise was taking place at the Vaziani military base, near Tbilisi, which was a Russian Air Force base until Russian forces withdrew at the start of this decade under a European arms-reduction agreement. Georgia and the Pentagon cooperate closely. Georgia has a 2,000-strong contingent supporting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and Washington provides training and equipment to the Georgian military.

Georgia last week recalled its ambassador in Moscow in protest to Russia sending fighter jets into Georgian airspace. Tbilisi urged the West to condemn Russia's actions. Russia said the flights were to prevent Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili from launching a military operation against South Ossetia. It was Russia's first admission for at least a decade that its air force had flown over Georgian territory without permission. Georgia has said in the past that Russia trespassed in its airspace, but Moscow has always denied it.

NATO said Tuesday that it was troubled by the Russian overflights, saying they called into question Moscow's role as a peacekeeper and facilitator of talks between Tbilisi and separatists. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer urged all parties, including Russia, to support Georgian territorial integrity as called for in UN Security Council resolutions, alliance spokesman James Appathurai said. "The secretary-general is concerned by the recent escalation of tension in Georgia, he is troubled by Russia's statement that its military aircraft deliberately overflew Georgian territory in violation of its territorial integrity," Appathurai said. "These actions raise questions about Russia's role as peacekeeper and facilitator of negotiations," he said, speaking on behalf of de Hoop Scheffer.

Early this year, Russia established semiofficial ties with South Ossetia, and Abkhazia and beefed up the peacekeeping forces it has had in Abkhazia since the end of a war in the 1990s. Georgia accused Russia of trying to annex its territory, and Tbilisi's Western allies said Russia was stoking tensions. Russia, angered by Georgia's hopes to join NATO and the European Union, said it acted to defend the breakaway regions from Georgian aggression. The United States on Monday criticized Russia as well for intentionally violating Georgian airspace. U.S. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "We are deeply troubled by Russia's statement that its military aircraft deliberately violated Georgia's internationally recognized borders." In a statement issued late Monday, McCormack urged all countries, "including Russia," to "support Georgia's sovereignty and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders."

The Financial Times calls upon the West to "stand up to Russia":

If proof were needed of the significance of the crisis facing the troubled Caucasus state of Georgia, it came on Tueday with the start of exercises involving 1,000 US troops.

US officials insist the long-planned wargames have nothing to do with the recent dispute between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But they give Washington a chance to support pro-west Tbilisi at a critical time.

The exercises come just after Moscow brazenly admitted sending war planes over South Ossetia last week, allegedly to stop an attack by Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president. While Russia has encroached on Georgian air space many times in supporting Abkhazia and South Ossetia, this was the first time in recent years that it has openly confessed to what was a flagrant violation of Georgia’s territorial integrity. With the action coinciding with a visit to Tbilisi by Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, the message to the west was brutally clear: stay off our turf.

It is a message the US and the European Union must not accept. Russia is not interested in Abkhazia and South Ossetia per se. It has not recognised their independence claims for fear of setting precedents for its own Caucasus minorities. But Moscow is very interested in stopping Georgia developing as a pro-west state – and blocking its bid to join Nato. The west must be equally determined to help Tbilisi follow its chosen course. The problems involved in admitting a fragile state with separatist regions into Nato will take time to resolve. But the direction must be clear.

Georgia matters to the west because it is the current standard-bearer of the democratic revolt against Moscow that began in central Europe in 1989. While the flags of freedom flying in Tbilisi are stained by Mr Saakashvili’s authoritarian lapses, Georgia’s leaders still generally embrace democratic values. Also, Georgia straddles the only non-Russian route taking Caspian oil and gas to world markets. Lose Georgia, and Russia wins an even bigger say over energy supplies. The risks were highlighted by this week’s cut, for technical reasons, in Russian oil flows to the Czech Republic after Prague agreed to host part of the US missile shield.

Certainly, the west should try to engage Russia in talks over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as long as they are based on preserving Georgian sovereignty. It should also redouble efforts to restrain hotheads in Tbilisi from resorting to violence. But when Russia bullies Georgia. the west must back its vulnerable ally.

July 16, 2008 -- Contents

WEDNESDAY JULY 16 CONTENTS

(1) EDITORIAL: Good Riddance, Mr. Bush

(2) EDITORIAL: Dima Medvedev, the Naked Emperor

(3) An Open Letter to the Editor of the Moscow Times

(4) Putin's Russia: Back to the USSR

(5) Race Violence Out of Control in Putin's Russia

EDITORIAL: Good Riddance, Mr. Bush

EDITORIAL

Good Riddance, Mr. Bush

Well, George Bush has done it again.

First he looks in Putin's eyes and declares him trustworthy. Then he invites Russia's General Shamanov, an infamous war criminal, over for tea and photo ops at the White House. And now as he leaves office, he's killing the Voice of America Russian broadcast.

Writing in the Moscow Times on June 26th, under the headline "Forget Defeat, Momentum Now with Russia" an abject moron named Mitch Phillips stated: "Spain hammered Russia 4-1 in the group stage of Euro 2008, but it should be a very different game when they meet again in Thursday's semifinal, with Russia transformed by the return of Andrei Arshavin."

It was, indeed, quite different. In the second match, Russia failed to score a single goal, ending the two-match rubber down 7-1.

And that's the Moscow Times talking, relatively speaking a voice of informed illumination compared to the rest of Russia's media establishment, which is owned and operated by the Kremlin. Do you dare to imagine what sort of gibberish might have aired on the RTR television network?

The Voice of America was one of Russia's few possible antidotes to that kind of gibberish -- that is, when it wasn't being feverishly jammed by the Kremlin. With little Internet access* and massive crackdown against bloggers underway, Russians had virtually no sources of real information left about the world, and now George Bush is knifing the VOA baby and leaving Russians utterly in the neo-Soviet darkness. It's pretty ironic that just as the Kremlin is gearing up its Russia Today propaganda network, the United States is choking off the main counterbalancing force at VOA. It's almost, in fact, as if George Bush were a KGB agent working for Vladimir Putin himself.

Mr. Bush has betrayed democracy in just about every way it can possibly be betrayed, and the sooner he is evicted from Washington DC the better. On his watch, Republicans have lost control of Congress and seen the ideals of Ronald Reagan severely undermined; they as much as anyone should be delighted to give Mr. Bush the bum's rush out the door.

One can only hope that America's next president will see the utter insanity of shutting down the VOA's Russia service and will immediately restore it. If Barack Obama were any kind of defender of the liberals value he supposedly stands for, he would already have announced that upon entering the White House his first official act would be to switch the juice back on at VOA Russia, and it's something he should readily find bipartisan support for among the Republicans. Instead, Obama is absolutely silent as to what specific steps he would take to stand up for liberal democracy in Russia, a shameful display from someone who promises "change we can believe in." John McCain is foursquare on record calling for specific moves to stand up to Putin's Russia, but ought to directly address the VOA, a perfect opportunity for him to distance himself from the woeful Bush record on Russia.

*NOTE: In September 2007 the size of Russia's internet audience was just 14 million, less than 10% of the population. That represented a massive increase from the even more puny 12 million a year before. Russia's internet audience is the same size as that of Spain, a country with less than one-third Russia's population. It is rivaled by tiny Netherlands, which is nearly one-tenth the size of Russia. Given the average Russian's wage of $4/hour and the cost of access, which is roughly the same as in Europe, this is hardly surprising. And given the Kremlin's willingness to prosecute a person who wrote a comment on a blog as a criminal (and to shut down website like The eXile entirely), even less so. Easily three-quarters of Russia's population are totally cut off from the world wide web in any practical sense.

EDITORIAL: Dima Medvedev, the Naked Emperor

EDITORIAL

Dima Medvedev, the Naked Emperor

Writing the in the Moscow Times on Monday, former member of parliament Vladimir Ryzhkov wrote of the recent G-8 summit meeting in Japan:

The summit was Medvedev's big G8 debut, but unfortunately it did not come off very well for him. During the meeting between Medvedev and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday, a British secret service agent chose that particular day to claim that the Russian government likely played a part in the 2006 poisoning in London of Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko. Moreover, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice secured agreements for the placement of elements of a U.S. missile-defense system in the Czech Republic, and then flew to Tbilisi to demonstrate approval for the Georgian government, which is trying to join NATO. At the G8, Bush pressed hard on all of Russia's sorest points -- NATO expansion, missile-defense systems in Europe and Kosovo.

Indeed, no sooner had the summit ended than the United States was calling Medvedev a liar on the record at the United Nations Security Council over its veto of the Council decision to sanction the barbaric dictatorship of Robert Mugabe in Zimbawe. The MT reported: "In an unusually harsh statement, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, accused Medvedev of going back on an earlier promise and "standing with Mugabe against the people of Zimbabwe. The U-turn in the Russian position is particularly surprising and disturbing ... [and] raises questions about its reliability as a G8 partner."

But you wouldn't know any of this listening to the Kremlin's lapdogs. In another op-ed the same day in the MT, sycophant Vladimir Frolov wrote: "President Dmitry Medvedev has clearly passed muster at his first Group of Eight summit in Japan last week."

The Russian Emperor, as is so often the case, struts boldly about in public in his birthday suit. Having shut down all significant independent media and opposition parties (booting, for example, Mr. Ryzhkov out of the Duma), the Russian leadership has no more grasp of reality than did their Soviet predecessors (and why should they, given that Mr. Putin has retained power in exactly the same manner as Mugabe and, unlike him, is a proud officer of the secret police himself).

The fact is that Putin's Russia deserves UN sanctions just as much as Mugabe's Zimbabwe does, but the issue won't be raised at the UN because of Russia's veto power making it a non-starter. But now we see that Russia won't be content to block pro-democracy action by the UN against itself, it will use its malignant membership role to block all such actions against any countries, fearing the precedent.

So the next best thing is to boot Russia out of the G-8 and keep it out of the WTO hen house as well, and perhaps now the world is slowly beginning to realize what a no-brainer this decision really is. Only by such dramatic means do we have any hope of breaking through the new iron curtain and communicating with the people of Russia that their leader is in serious risk of catching pneumonia if he continues his naked promenade across the Kremlin's chilly parapets.

An Open Letter to the Editor of the Moscow Times

LR publisher Kim Zigfeld recently sent the following letter to the editor of the Moscow Times. As we've previously indicated, it seems unlikely he has the fortitude to publish it.

To the Editor:

It was rather amusing to read in an op-ed from Kremlin supporter Vladimir Frolov (7/14) that "President Dmitry Medvedev has clearly passed muster at his first Group of Eight summit in Japan last week." The contrast with a news article the same date on declarations from Washington and London which basically called Medvedev a liar for breaking a previous promise to support UN sanctions against the rogue dictatorship in Zimbabwe could not be more stark. You reported: "In an unusually harsh statement, Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, accused Medvedev of going back on an earlier promise and 'standing with Mugabe against the people of Zimbabwe. The U-turn in the Russian position is particularly surprising and disturbing ... [and] raises questions about its reliability as a G8 partner.'"

If Medvedev had really been so impressive at the G-8, then Khalilzad wouldn't have used such intensely confrontational rhetoric. Mr. Frolov doesn't seem to realize that Russia, much less well qualified for G-8 membership than India and Brazil and not yet even a member of the WTO, is standing on the brink of international pariah status. As is so often the case behind the iron curtain, few are able to realize that the Emperor has no clothes.

Kim Zigfeld
Publisher, La Russophobe

Putin's Russia: Back to the USSR

Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute is surely one of the most brilliant and insightful Russia scholars working today. His most recent column in the Washington Post explains in horrifying detail how Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, is slowly taking his country back to the dark days of Soviet failure. In devastatingly few words, Aron exposes the fundamentally fraudulent character of what now can only be properly called a neo-Soviet state (as we have been doing for more than two years now, well ahead of the curve -- it's gratifying to see the mainstream world finally catching up with us).

Vladimir Putin's appointment this spring as prime minister of the symbolic "union" of Russia and Belarus was yet another example of the troubling similarities between today's Russia and the other most stable and prosperous Russian regime of the past 80 years: Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union in the 1970s. That economy, too, was fueled by then-record oil prices. And while there are clear differences between the two Russias, if these tendencies go unchecked, the increasingly authoritarian and economically statist country may soon face crises of the kind that became apparent under Brezhnev and contributed to the Soviet Union's demise.

The most disturbing of these propensities include:

• The national alcoholic binge. In the 1970s, Soviets annually consumed eight liters of strong (40 to 80 percent proof) alcoholic beverages per person -- more than any other country. Between 1964 and 1980, male life expectancy fell from 67 to 62. Today, per capita consumption of vodka, which is four times cheaper in relation to the average salary than 30 years ago, has grown to 10 liters, according to official statistics (outside experts say it is higher). By contrast, the most recent data available from the World Health Organization show the corresponding U.S. figure is 2.57 liters. One in 10 Russian men is thought to be an alcoholic. Life expectancy for Russian men is less than 60.6 years, more than 15 years shorter than in the United States and European Union and below current levels in Pakistan or Bangladesh.

• Oil-for-food. This spring, Putin admitted that 70 percent of the food consumed in Russia's largest cities is imported, a situation he decried as "intolerable." This problem, too, first surfaced in the 1970s, when grain imports were so high that by the end of the decade they supplied the flour for every third loaf of bread. When oil prices collapsed, Russia was forced to spend gold reserves and seek loans -- and eventually found itself without grain or gold. After agricultural land was denationalized in the early 1990s, food became available almost immediately -- for the first time in almost 70 years it could be had without hours-long lines and rationing coupons. Russia started to export grain. Yet agricultural land was never legally privatized, and rules for long-term leasing have been left to local authorities.

Not surprisingly, such legal gray areas have given rise to corruption, increased production costs and hampered innovation. Provincial governors, who are no longer elected and answer only to the president, pressure successful entrepreneurs and farmers to "share" with local authorities. A leading industrialist told me that at least six local agencies conduct almost weekly "inspections" of his potato farm. State agriculture subsidies often go to the largest and best politically connected enterprises, not necessarily the most productive ones.

The ruble's steady appreciation because of huge petro-dollar inflows further depresses the domestic food industry. Should Russia allow the ruble to float, at least partially, to help curb inflation, it would become even more expensive, encouraging demand for better-quality and, often cheaper, imported food.

Putin's remedies have the same flavor as Brezhnev's: Throw billions in subsidized credits and grants at the problem instead of strengthening property rights and making it easi