(1) Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Putin via Essel, Part 7

(2) EDITORIAL: Annals of Russian Ignorance

(3) Exposing Potemkin Russia

(4) The Putin Legacy

(5) Freedom of Speech in Russia has its Limits: All of Them

(6) The Education of a Russophile

(7) Amnesty International Rips Putin a New One

NOTE: Putin's Russia receives truly withering, devastating fire today in #1, #3 and #4 from Boris Nemtsov, the Chicago Tribune and the Moscow Times. What a triple threat!

NOTE: On Publius Pundit, more on Russia's visa war.

NOTE: This is the sixth part of a serialized translation of Boris Nemtsov's white paper critiquing the Putin years. It includes the tenth and eleventh chapters of the work. Part 1 (introduction and chapter one) appeared on Monday, Part 2 (chapter two) on Wednesday, Part 3 (chapters three and four) appeared on Friday, Part 4 (chapters five and six) appeared on Sunday, Part 5 (chapters seven and eight) appeared on Monday and Part 6 (chapter nine) appeared on Wednesday. Look for Part 8, which may be the final installment, on Sunday. You can display all the parts in reverse sequence on a single web page by simply clicking the "nemtsov white paper" link at the bottom of this post. The entire translated white paper document, including the final sections not yet published here as HTML, is now available as PDF (this link is now also permanently in our sidebar).

Putin: the Bottom Line

by Boris Nemtsov

First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, 1997-1998

and

Vladimir Milov

Deputy Minister of Energy, 2002

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Chapter 10

Worsening Inequality

Russia is a country of the most massive inequality. This can be seen everywhere and in many different things. And this inequality – between the regions and between people – is only getting worse.

The average nominal monthly wage in Moscow is 20 thousand rubles. In places rich in natural resources, for example the Khanti-Mansiisk, Yamal-Nenets, Chukotsk regions and the Nenets autonomous district, it is 25-30 thousand. Real incomes in Moscow are of course considerably greater than that. At the same time, the average wage in Dagestan is 4500 rubles and a bit more – 6-8 thousand rubles – in the Central Black Earth region. In fewer than a third of the Russian regions is the average over or equal to the average wage for the whole of Russia (11 thousand rubles per month); in all the rest of the country it is lower.

At the same time as in 4-5 regions of Russia people are now living no worse than in developed Western countries, in the rest of the country they are living on a par with Mexico. One of the reasons for this differentiation is Putin’s policy of budgetary colonialism. Back in 2000, government expenditure was divided 50/50 between the centre and the regions. Now it is 65/35. Another reason is state monopoly capitalism, the model whereby the country’s natural resources are exploited, that has taken shape in Russia. Smaller businesses and those not involved in raw materials in areas without such resources are unable to develop – because of the high barriers to market entry maintained by officialdom and the monopolies they have links with, because of the government’s tax terror policies, because of the risk of losing what they own, and because of the poorly developed infrastructure.

To overcome this differentiation, it is vital that support be given to economic activities by the people, to developing small businesses, to involving as wide a circle of people as possible in entrepreneurial activities. This is the only way to make a meaningful number of Russians if not rich, then at least well-off.

During Putin’s presidency, however, the number of small enterprises has practically not risen in Russia. There are about one million of these today. That is less than 7 companies per 1000 population. This should be compared to the EC average of 45 per thousand, 50 per thousand in Japan, and 75 per thousand in the USA! In Western countries, about 50% of the working population is to be found in such enterprises and in Japan nearly 80%. Only 9 million Russians – 12% of the working population – work in small businesses. And these small businesses make a proportionate contribution to our GDP. This may be compared again to the USA, where the contribution by small businesses to the GDP is 50% and to the Eurozone where it is 60%. It should come as no surprise that people live more richly and in those countries and that they have a large middle class, which is not the case in Russia.

As a result, the people who get rich in Russia are those who are close to where the earnings from natural resources are to be found. Some crumbs do fall off the table. And while plain people’s incomes have risen, they have not risen in anything like the way the wealth of the oligarchs has. The average wage in Russia has risen from $80 per month in 2000 to over $400 today. Over the same period, however, Putin’s Russia has beaten all records in growing numbers of billionaires. In 1999-200, Forbes List carried not a single Russian. By 2007 there were 53 and their total wealth amount to $282 billion.

First place went by rights to Roman Abramovich with $18.7 billion. We now rank third in the world for number of billionaires after the USA and Germany.

There’s “Combat the Oligarchs” for you! Under Putin, they have only become richer. And those who were able to build a tight relationship with Putin, to successfully sell Sibneft to him, have become richest of all. Bear in mind also that the wealth of top officials and those close to them – secret owners of property, of Swiss oil and gas trading companies, beneficiaries of a myriad offshore trusts, of ties with Putin & Co. – are beyond the scope of Forbes List and remain invisible.

This is not a call to arms against the billionaires. Russia needs billionaires. It is a sign that a market economy has taken shape and that large national companies have been created. However, the explosion in their numbers and their wealth in comparison to the modest enrichment of the rest of the country is more a sign that all is very much not well with Putin’s Russia and that the widely advertised battle against the oligarchs is just a propaganda slogan to cover up the government’s support for certain oligarchs.

We also think that a very different set of economic policies could create far more opportunities for many more Russians to get richer. A climate favourable to enterprise, open and free competition, reasonable conditions for business development, especially small and medium enterprises, independent courts of law, guarantees for property rights – these are the things which would help enterprises to develop in a big way and, just as importantly, help the middle class to develop. In Russia too many assets are concentrated in the hands of big business and a wider range of the population is unable to start up because of the high barriers to market entry – fruit of the alliance between the monopolies and corrupt officialdom.

The recipes for solving these problems exist. However, in order to be successful in this, the criminal-monopolistic economic system that has taken shape under Putin must be dismantled.

Chapter 11 The Economic Bubble

We are all supposed to be over the moon at the success of the economy under Putin. In reality, however, it is not doing that well. Given today’s oil prices, our GDP growth has actually been remarkably modest. With the windfall from oil that our economy has been enjoying, we should have been seeing growth rates of 10-15% percent like our oil-exporting neighbours Kazakhstan or Azerbaidzhan. Even oil-importing countries such as China and India, who pay today’s sky-high world prices for their fuel, have been growing at 8-10% a year. Our 6-7% looks modest against this background. Oil-rich Russia’s GDP growth rate is one of the lowest in the CIS. Back in 2000, our GDP growth rate was the second fastest in the CIS. By 2007, we ranked eighth.

Putin has not brought about even this GDP growth. Russia’s economy began to grow in 1997 and continued to do so after the crisis of 1998. In 1999, the growth rate was 6.4%, the same as the average growth rate under Putin. It would be weird indeed if we were unable to make our economy grow at such a rate at a time when oil prices are so high. It is notable that it is mainly the private sector of the economy which has seen any growth; the state companies have shown very modest results indeed.

For the economy to have developed faster would have needed structural reforms, the establishment of a climate favourable to investments in new projects, and a modernisation of the economy. We have furthermore failed to convert what we have achieved into a real economic modernisation of the country and revival of production capability. Instead of modernising, the Putin régime has devoted its attention to dividing the spoils, thus missing this favourable reform opportunity. We may not get another such chance again. We will evidently be forced to make painful social transformations (for example the pension reform we have already mentioned) when oil prices have fallen again.

Investment in production has slowed down as a result of the tough way private business is dealt with. Instead of creating new assets, companies have preferred to invest in real estate. A two-room flat built in Soviet times on the outskirts of Moscow now chnages hands for $200 thousand – a price inflation caused by investors buying up properties as capital investments. Gazprom’s capitalisation rose from less than $10 billion in 2001 to $350 billion today, despite the fact that its gas production has not increased while its costs and debt have risen threefold as it prefers to buy assets rather to to bring new deposits on line. What is this if not a bubble, a bubble that may burst with a very big bang?

Debt accumulated by corporations for the purchase of assets instead of investing in production now exceeds $400 billion and is nearly equal to the state’s financial reserves. The major borrowers are Gazprom, Rosneft, and the state banks. Should any of these corporations default, it is going to be the Russian public which will have to pay the cost as state reserves will be rapidly frittered away on keeping the inefficient state companies afloat.

Government expenditure, first and foremost for the benefit of the growing state apparatus and special services, has of course risen faster than GDP growth. Planned government spending on its own management, national security, and law enforcement for 2008 stands at $39 billion (compared to $4 billion in 2000). This is three times as much as has been allocated to the “national projects”. There are now over 600,000 civil servants. Government efficiency has nonetheless not improved; crime rates remain high and are in fact higher than in the 1990s.

The government policy favouring the mass creation of state enterprises has only increased the appetites of the recipients of government money. These corporations cannot compete on the open market without state aid. Pouring government money into the economy has already resulted in a burst of inflation which has hurt plain people (inflation is no abstract economic phenomenon). Consumer inflation of up to 15% and more means that prices are rising painfully fast. The monopolisation of the economy under Putin – the inevitable result of civil servants protecting “their” companies and hindering competition – has only poured oil on the flames. World Bank experts have tried to estimate how concentrated ownership has become in Russia and concluded that state companies and the 22 largest private financial and industrial groups control nearly two-thirds of industrial turnover. Over half the banking system’s assets are controlled by banks affiliated with the state or powerful officials. Of these, about 45% are controlled by just 4 banks: Sberbank, Gazprombank, VTB, and the Bank of Moscow.

And this is what they call the Putin “economic miracle”?

We need another kind of economy. We need a competitive economy with low barriers to investment, low levels of government involvement in corporate management and spending. We need alongside that a strong and effective state regulatory system, above all to control monopolies, aimed not at sheltering friendly businesses and dividing the spoils but at ensuring all the players in the market abide by civilised rules and compete fairly.

It is vitally important that small businesses develop in Russia. This was covered in greater detail in the chapter on worsening inequality. But small businesses are prevented from developing in Russia by administrative barriers, corruption, and the monopolism of commercial organisations with protection from officialdom. The barriers hindering the development of small businesses should be dismantled. Of the many things that could be done to help them, the most important is to combat corruption at all levels of the government and to de-monopolise the economy.

Government money should be used not to help state corporations and to inflate expenditure on the government apparatus and special services but on public health, education and the army. There should be the strictest of oversights over government spending. We need to sharply reduce state involvement in the economy and go back to arranging honest privatisations in the way we began to practise in 1997-2000. Businesses need guaranteed property rights, working laws, and independent courts of law.

It is entirely within our power to build such an economy. But to do so, we must refrain from making use of the services of Putin and his circle.

The Moscow Times reports that when Russian "president" Vladimir Putin was asked about rumor he has stolen billions from the national treasury, he refused to give a direct answer, responding: "Просто болтовня, которую нечего обсуждать, просто чушь. (It's just blather that isn't worth discussing, just rubbish.)." He then added: "Всё выковыряли из носа и размазали по своим бумажкам. (They just picked it out of their nose and smeared it on their little sheets.)" The MT points out that "the Kremlin translators gave this vivid image a pass, rendering it as: "They just made it up and included it in their papers." So it seems that the Kremlin is not only censoring what the Russian people hear, but also attempting to put blinders on the West.

Russia is a nation that likes to fancy itself erudite, cultured and well-educated. But the truth, as "President" Putin's coarse language shows and as the New York Times recently reported, is somewhat different. Here's how Russia's "education" system got involved in the recent elections to parliament, for instance:

Parents at some schools were ordered to attend mandatory meetings with representatives of United Russia, and the children were used to drag their parents to the polls. “It was the same scenario at all the schools,” a teacher said. “And it was all from the city’s leadership. The school directors were given instructions, and they carried them out.”

Regional officials were vigilant about developments at local universities, particularly two of the largest, Lobachevsky State and Volga State. Students said they were warned not to join marches sponsored by the Other Russia coalition. And they said that before the elections, administrators issued a threat: if you do not vote for the ruling party, you will be evicted from your dorms. “Everyone was frightened, and our group, in full, went and voted, like a line of soldiers marching,” said a Volga State student. Administrators at both universities said the students’ statements about pressure were false.

Yet it did not stop with the voting.

Shortly after election day, several hundred Lobachevsky students were told that they were being bused to Moscow, but the university would not say why. When they were let off near Red Square, they found themselves among a huge throng of people.It was only then that they realized that they had become unwilling participants in a rally sponsored by Nashi, a fiercely pro-Kremlin youth group, to celebrate United Russia’s triumph and to congratulate Mr. Putin.

Putin projects himself as a popular leader, yet he needs to engage in this type of neo-Soviet barbarism in order to win? Russia projects itself as a civilized, educated nation -- yet this is how it conducts the scholastic process?

A Russian commenter responded to the story, which the Times translated and ran in Russia:

My son was taken to Moscow from a university in another city for a United Russia event. Each student was paid about 800 rubles for the trip, I think. They were asked to vote for United Russia, but of course, no one was forcing their hands, and thus were able to vote as they pleased. It's just that the main political competition is represented by a bunch of clowns. The party of power seems to largely encourage this aberration with its own behavior. The students at Lobachevsky University were simply duped with money that the organizers of the trip had stolen.

Putin is completely innocent here (unfortunately). People in Russia have always been forced to go to demonstrations, to vote or to sign some kind of petition. These are the initiatives of local officials large and small, who maintain their thrones, not thanks to professionalism, but thanks to intrigues and brown nosing.

Make no mistake: This commenter is speaking for the vast majority of Russians. Putin runs the "party of power" and it "encourages" this "aberration" but Putin is "completely innocent" of misconduct. Students are bribed to vote and herded around like zombies, but that's perfectly fine since nobody actually put a gun to their heads. Pandemic corruption in the school system? So what, it's always been like that. No need for any type of reform, no need for outrage, not a word about the total absence of any real opposition emerging from the elections, so that now Russia's parliament is a pathetic, Zimbabwe-like rubber stamp.

Another commenter offered a different perspective:

This is an exercise I do with my Russian colleagues and friends regularly, it's called "name the country"; Here it goes: 1) the country has huge oil and gas resources, but lacks the technology and expertise to run the industry. 2) Qualified people flee the country. 3) The government makes it very difficult for foreigners to run a business and work legally(and hire locals by the way). 4) The corrupt and backward education system produces very few quality graduates. 5) Basic infrastructure - water, electricity, airports, health care,wiring,roads, plumbing - is a disaster. 6) The most lucrative career for young girls is either marriage or prostitution (apart from a few smart female accountants) 7) Money from natural resources is hoarded by a small corrupt elite.8)The elites blame western oil companies for the stealing this money.9) The masses are led to believe their country is rich because the ruling elite drive new Toyota Land Cruisers purchased with the stolen money. Answer - it depends. If it is warm outside it's Nigeria, and if it's ice cold, must be Russia.

— Eric Vigod, Sakhalin,Russia (ex-NYC'er)

What's the net result of all this? Well, you get a Russian "professor" of "international relations" telling the BBC that "Gazprom is an instrument of Russian foreign policy, like American oil companies are instruments of American foreign policy." He ignores the fact that Gazprom is state owned while American oil companies are not. He ignores the fact that Gazprom is monopoly, while American oil companies have furious competition. He responds to an accusation in the manner of a small child who is called "stupid" and answers simply "no, you are!" Within the ivory tower that is Russia, or at least the Kremlin, this seems to make some kind of sense, just as was the case in Soviet times.

But from even a little way beyond Russia's borders, the professor stands naked as a jaybird.

Vladimir Putin's Russia is now officially under massive assault, at long last, from America's major media. First the New York Times came out with a huge front-page article exposing the Russian dictatorship, complete with a translation into Russian, and now the Chicago Tribune reports on Potemkin Russia's total failure to deliver an improved quality of live outside Moscow:

Behind a scrim of billionaires and petrodollars, Russian cities like this one are dying a slow, quiet death deep in the frigid, remote Far East. Many Russians here haven't worked for more than a decade. They survive on whatever they can lug on their scrap carts—radiators and washing machines, bricks and bathtubs scavenged from a cityscape of boarded-up buildings. Scalpels at the hospital here are brown with rust. Every month, a local heating utility sends collectors to families who haven't paid a bill in nine years. Factories that churned out everything from Soviet-era mortar shells and mines to linoleum and cardboard wasted away years ago, leaving a city of 47,000 without work, or any sense of purpose.

The cold, dark second-floor household of the Chursin family sums up life in Amursk. Natalya Chursina and her husband feed and clothe their teenage son, Zhenya, on welfare payments that amount to $5 a day. At 14, Zhenya has decided that school is optional. When he skips class in winter, he and his friends hop onto ice floes and ride them like skiffs through the roiled waters of the Amur River. It's a place and a life Chursina and her husband, Vladimir, desperately want their son to escape. "People die like flies here," says Chursina, 41. "Everything here is on the decline."

The energy wealth that wrested much of Russia from the brink of an economic abyss and gave the Kremlin its newfound swagger has yet to revive cities like Amursk. On Sunday, Russians are expected to elect as their new president Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's longtime protege and a loyal adherent to his blueprint for prosperity. But eight years after Putin began implementing that blueprint, a hidden Russia still languishes, masked by Moscow's moneyed extravagance and conspicuous consumption. Most of Russia's 119,000 millionaires live in greater Moscow, the world's most expensive city, amid a burgeoning middle class that has discovered mortgages and jams the aisles of the capital's two Ikea stores. Move beyond the capital's showy facade and you find a vulnerable Russia—a national population evaporating at a rate of 720,000 people each year and an aging, neglected infrastructure.

Russia's economic resurgence has been both real and remarkable. It now has the world's third-largest collection of billionaires and a gross domestic product growing by nearly 7 percent every year. The ruble is getting stronger. Overall, poverty and unemployment are down. Yet that resurgence has its limits. In Siberia and the Russian Far East, a population of 30.6 million withers at a rate of 103,000 people each year, victims of wayward Soviet planning that put whole cities in one of the planet's coldest expanses.

Dilapidated Soviet-era infrastructure from roads and electrical grids to housing and telephone lines saps Russia's productivity. In much of the country, factories saddled with aging, outdated machinery lag far behind their counterparts in the U.S., China and Southeast Asia. The Russian Academy of Sciences says more than half of Russia's industrial machinery is over 20 years old, compared to just 15 percent in 1990.

In the waning years of his presidency, Putin has begun trumpeting the need to shore up debilitated infrastructure, revamp health care and solve the country's worrisome population plunge. But analysts believe he could have acted much sooner. His decision to serve as prime minister alongside Medvedev could give him the chance to make up for lost time. "These problems have worsened over the course of many years. Now when they're very serious, they're getting noticed," said Nikolay Petrov, a former Kremlin adviser and an analyst with the Carnegie Moscow Center, a Moscow think tank affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The price for not doing anything about this for years will be huge."

A weak Russia—one that cannot sustain a labor force, restore its social safety net or rebuild decaying infrastructure—risks becoming an unstable Russia. And instability in a country with the world's second-largest nuclear arsenal and a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council poses a danger the U.S. and Western Europe can ill afford. "Their infrastructure will be hard to maintain—they've had a significant loss of population; they're shrinking at a time when their oil reserves are growing," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "It's very important that [Russia remains] stable. It affects America greatly."

To make the giant leap from emerging economy to global powerhouse, analysts say, Russia must transform itself from a wellspring of energy, wood and metals to a country that produces as well as exports—and makes human capital its most valuable resource. Nowhere in Russia is that task more urgent than in Siberia, an expanse of rugged beauty and economic ruin. Siberia's southern neighbor, China, ravenously consumes Russian oil and timber, sending some of it back to Russia as finished goods. That lopsided conduit benefits China far more than Russia, experts say, and only deepens Siberia's plight. "Without a sustainable economy in the country's eastern half," says Dmitri Trenin, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "I see Russia becoming a junior partner to China."

While Putin has done little to remedy eastern Russia's economic woes in his eight years in office, he didn't create them. Nor did his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, though his chaotic stewardship made life measurably worse in this region. Today's eastern Russia hobbles because of decisions made decades ago, by Soviet planners who built cities in places where no one would choose to live. Siberia's winters are the world's harshest. More than 2,600 miles from Moscow, Irkutsk's population of 593,000 shivers through Januaries that average 11 degrees below zero at night. Remoteness also made Siberia a poor choice for city-building. Everything in Russia—power, money, commerce—loops back to Moscow. But Khabarovsk is an eight-hour flight from Moscow, or an eight-day train ride on the Trans-Siberian Railway. A flight from Moscow to Vladivostok, Russia's largest Pacific port, takes nine hours. But neither climate nor distance weighed heavily in Josef Stalin's vision. Tapping Siberia's bonanza of gold, oil, nickel and timber required cities, Stalin's planners believed, and so Soviet leaders forcibly settled workers there.

Like other Siberian cities, Amursk was made to order. Soviet leaders wanted a cluster of defense-industry factories built by a bend in the Amur River, and in 1958 they dispatched laborers and bulldozers to build Amursk's plants, beige-brick apartment buildings and tree-lined boulevards. As a cog in the Soviet Union's centralized economy, Amursk flourished. Its pulp-processing plant made more cardboard than any other Soviet factory. Its timber mill sent particleboard to Japan, Australia and the U.S. Amursk's birthrate exceeded the Soviet average, as did its per capita weddings. Then, in the late 1980s, a plunge in oil prices broadsided the Soviet economy. With the end of the Cold War, orders for Amursk's munitions factories ceased. Moscow told the plants to convert for civilian use but did nothing to make that happen.

Much of the town's youth fled. Everyone else found themselves trapped in a city without work. Today many survive on government aid or the pensions of parents and grandparents.

'We get only words'

Leonard Bolotnikov, a retired pulp factory worker with a round, ruddy face and snow-white hair, says that after he pays rent and utilities, his monthly pension leaves him $19.53. Steeling himself against a bracing wind on an icy winter morning, he jabs his finger at the abandoned, ransacked buildings that line Mir Avenue. "We get only words and more words from our leaders," says Bolotnikov, 66, his face flushed with anger. "Look at these buildings. Everything is destroyed. Young people are leaving. My heart bleeds when I look at this."

The Soviet collapse ravaged all of Russia, but the toll was especially harsh on what Russians call grado-obrazuyushy, cities built around a single factory. In Biryusinsk in east Siberia, a solvents manufacturer buoyed the lives of 12,000 Russians during the Soviet era. The plant in turn was tethered to a cluster of sawmills that processed larch and pine and supplied the plant with sawdust, its primary raw material. "We could buy fur coats back then," says Olga Loginova, 47, a fermentation room worker.

In the post-Soviet chaos of the 1990s, hundreds of sawmills went bankrupt, including the Biryusinsk plant's suppliers. The factory had to pay more for sawdust from mills farther away. By 2005, at a time when Moscow wealth was pushing up downtown real estate prices to nearly $1,000 per square foot, Biryusinsk plant workers were jamming into the factory's grocery to receive management's substitute for a paycheck: loaves of bread. "It was like during World War II, when people stood in line for hours to get a little bread," Loginova said. "We lived on this bread and on our vegetable gardens." In December 2005, the plant stopped production. Much of the town's youth has fled; older Russians here scrape by on $125 monthly pensions. Their adult children live off those same pensions. "We are no longer wanted here," says Anatoly Chubukov, a former truck driver who helped build railroads in east Siberia. Now he nets fish for food and thaws snow for drinking water. "We built the village and the road, the trains run—so now we are throwaways."

Eager for a turnaround

Russian leaders are scrambling for ways to lure money and people back to Siberia, to make it a land of promise rather than a land of exile. In Irkutsk, bureaucrats have convinced themselves that building a "super city" will turn the tide. They believe that the provincial capital and two smaller satellite cities, Angarsk and Shelekhov, can be linked to form a megalopolis with a million people and a magnet for jobs, people and investors.

Sergei Voronov, Irkutsk's deputy provincial governor, lays out the blueprints: two new highways, 24 hotels, three ski resorts, a new airport and the timeworn cure-all of urban planners around the world, a monorail. "It's impossible to utilize our natural resources without a labor force," Voronov says. "Our purpose is to create a prestigious place to live in so that this notion of Siberia being a place of exile is not the perception people have. The idea behind this supercity is to use whatever economic leverage we have to improve the image of this place."

Russian leaders also have dusted off a century-old pipe dream to build a $65 billion, 68-mile highway and rail tunnel underneath the Bering Strait between Russia's Chukotka Peninsula and Alaska. Neither the Kremlin nor Washington has given any hint of backing the idea, but Viktor Razbegin, an official at the Russian Economic Development and Trade Ministry, has called the tunnel "one of the few projects that can dramatically change the development of the Far East." That kind of reliance on forced, oversize answers to Siberia's economic and demographic woes mirrors the Soviet policymaking that led to eastern Russia's plight in the first place. The cure lies not in building more glass and steel, experts say, but in investing in Siberia's human capital—improving health care, tackling rampant alcoholism, seeding the growth of small businesses.

"I've got a secret for the Kremlin: In the modern world, the wealth of nations isn't in the ground, but in the people walking the ground," says Nicholas Eberstadt, an expert in demography and economics at the American Enterprise Institute. "The strategy of abandoning human resources for the sake of natural resources is one that will, in the long run, end in tears."

"Twenty-eight percent of Russians think that the sun revolves around the earth. In other words, they live in a pre-Copernican age. And 30 percent of Russians think that if you boil radioactive milk, the radiation will disappear."

That's a quote from a recent blockbuster article in the Moscow Times reviewing the "Putin legacy" on the even of this weekend's "presidential elections," which will be one of the greatest atrocities against the institution of democracy in world history. Here's the full monty:

The public protests shook the president and nearly toppled a government. But the thousands of angry demonstrators that flooded onto the streets of towns and cities around the country in January 2005 were not opposition activists protesting the rollback of democracy or Kremlin policy in the Caucasus. The protesters bringing traffic to a halt and demanding that then-Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkov and his entire Cabinet be tossed out were the country's most economically vulnerable -- pensioners, the disabled, veterans -- enraged by the bread-and-butter issue of reform to the system of state subsidies for certain goods and services. "When the pensioners hit the streets in January 2005 in Moscow and all around the country, that really scared the government," said Yevgeny Gartung, State Duma deputy from the Just Russia party and former head of the now-defunct Pensioners Party.

The tumultuous scenes highlighted not just popular discontent at the replacement of the subsidized benefits by direct cash payments, but the government's vulnerability when attempting social reforms in general. Over the last eight years of economic boom, caused largely by record oil prices, the sustaining narrative of Vladimir Putin's tenure became a simple one: After the instability of the 1990s, life was getting better.

There is little doubt that some of the new wealth has filtered down. Official indicators show that the proportion of the population living in poverty has dropped; wages, consumption and living standards have risen; and a small middle class has emerged. But under Putin, critics argue, macroeconomic stability has also undercut any impetus for reform. This has meant that the health care and education systems have been left in dire straits, that pensions remain insufficient, that a good part of the rise in incomes is eaten up by inflation and that the inequalities that arose in the 1990s have only grown greater. Any improvement, they say, has come in spite of, rather than because of, Putin's policies.

Putin himself says that stability, rather than reform, has been his main achievement. In his recent legacy speech to the State Council, Putin said the conditions are now in place to allow Russians to expect real improvements, with improving living standards taking the primary place in his development plan through 2020. "Russia will become the best place to live," Putin said. "That's an absolute national priority." To this end, Putin's anointed successor, Dmitry Medvedev, whose main responsibility as first deputy prime minister was to usher in the national projects in health care, housing, education and agriculture, has made social-welfare issues central to his election platform. "Today these are the sorest points in our society -- pensioners' incomes, the health care system, the education system and housing," A Just Russia's Gartung said.

No Worse, No Better

The survey could have been published in the mid-1990s. A Levada Center poll released in January listed rising prices, poverty, the rich-poor divide and lack of access to medical treatment as the four biggest concerns for average Russians. Although average incomes have risen by more than 50 percent over the last four years in nominal terms, the impact has been significantly blunted by rising prices for essential items. Official inflation figures have been in the range of 10 percent in recent years, but many economists say the cost of staple products has been at least twice as much.

"In real terms, there has been practically no change in the quality of life for any of the sections of society we survey," said Natalya Tikhonova, head of the social policy department at the Higher School of Economics. "The situation has improved insofar as it has stopped getting worse after many years of deterioration."

Since Putin's public declaration of war on poverty in 2004, the number of people living under the official subsistence level has plummeted. Even if the official figure of 12 percent at present is a little rosier than the reality, it is still way down from the 1-in-3 figure of a decade ago. But while most are now are getting by safely, others have never had it so good. During Putin's tenure, income disparity both between rich and poor and among the regions has grown. According to official figures, the top 10 percent of the population takes home about 31 percent of total earnings and earns 15 times more than the bottom 10 percent. Independent analysts put this figure at closer to 30. "The more money there has been in the country, the worse our quality of life, life expectancy and education levels have become relative to other countries," said Oleg Smolin, a Communist State Duma deputy. "The economy does not work for the people, but the other way around."

And the gap is not just social but geographical.

"Of course the difference between living standards in Moscow and the regions is growing," said Gartung, who represented a Chelyabinsk district in the last Duma. "As a rule, prices in the regions are growing more quickly and wages are growing more slowly." In 2006, the gross domestic product per capita for Moscow was almost 30 times that of Ingushetia, statistics from the National Institute for Living Standards show. "If Moscow is currently on the same level as the Czech Republic, St. Petersburg is on the level of the Baltic States, and somewhere like Tuva is on par with Mongolia," said Smolin, who comes from the Siberian city of Omsk.

And unless something is done to prevent the gap from growing further, the social situation could become volatile. "Society has undoubtedly become more stable, but the danger of instability is growing again because of the gap between rich and poor," said A Just Russia's Gartung. While Putin's increasingly centralized -- some prefer the word "authoritarian" -- political system has created an atmosphere of stability, it might have the opposite effect in the long run. While in other developed countries multiparty political systems and civil society work to promote the interests of different sections of society, in Russia these social mechanisms do not work, Tikhonova said. "One of the questions is whether Russians have sacrificed democracy at too low a price," Sergei Guriyev, rector of the New Economic School said. "But I think that people tend to underestimate the intensity of the negative economic shock in the 1990s."

Guriyev said one hopeful sign was the evidence of a growing middle class, however nascent at present. "You look at characteristics such as mobile phone sales or real estate prices and they all demonstrate that the middle class is growing everywhere -- not just in Moscow," Guriyev said. Although estimates of the size of the middle class now range from 10 to 30 percent of the population, this still remains far below the two-thirds level common in Western Europe. Part of the problem, says Smolin, who serves on the Duma's Education and Science Committee, is that many teachers, doctors and academics still fall outside of the middle class. Smolin said one friend, an award-winning high school teacher in Omsk, earns just over 3,000 rubles, or about $125, per month while another who works as a principal and teacher earns 6,400 rubles per month.

Reform Stalled

One of the main problems, critics argue, is that, despite the centralization of power and the subservience of the parliament, the process of real reform has stumbled. Much-needed structural changes to the education, pension and health care systems have been held captive to vested interests and corruption, while poor legislation and a lack of public discourse have turned good ideas into catastrophes. Putin's first term was characterized by legislative caution, with macroeconomic stability rather than change the priority, said Vyacheslav Bobkov, director of the National Center for Living Standards. Much of the legislation passed in the first four years, like the introduction of the 13 percent flat income tax, was leftover from the Yeltsin period, along with many of the personnel, Bobkov said. "Putin and the administration did not know that oil prices would get, and stay, this high," the New Economic School's Guriyev said. "Only in 2002 and 2003 did they begin to believe that they would have money to spend on new things."

So, after his public admission of shame in 2003 of the poverty in which many Russians lived, Putin looked ready for more ambitious reforms at the start of his second term. Emboldened, perhaps, by high popularity ratings and a tighter grip on power -- and with a new team in place, including Mikhail Zurabov as health and social development minister and Andrei Fursenko as education minister -- Putin turned to housing, pensions and benefits.

Monetization

The switch from a long-standing system of free or heavily subsidized goods and services -- including medicine, public transport and utilities -- highlighted the difficulties involved in pursuing social reforms during Putin's second term. The program, generally referred to as "monetization," prompted the wave of protests at the outset of 2005. "Monetization was the biggest mistake," Gartung said. "It was correct in theory, but in practice there were lots of mistakes."

Many regional governments, on which the burden of many of the payments was to fall, found themselves unprepared and short of funds to deal with the new responsibilities. Putin, meanwhile, was forced to publicly upbraid four of his ministers, including two of the highest-profile economic liberals -- Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin and Economic and Trade Development Minister German Gref. Reform after that became more cautious. "The government realized that these reforms were very risky, so whenever you want to change something you have to throw a lot of money at it," Guriyev said. "If it's a government that has a lot of money, it's not a bad idea."

But just over a year later -- in March 2006 -- protesters were out on the streets across the country again to protest reforms that saw household utilities bills shoot up. Zurabov, the minister most associated with the reforms, quickly became the lightning rod for criticism. After a reform to the state-subsidized drug program left thousands short of medicine in 2007, Zurabov took the fall, being shown the door when Mikhail Fradkov's government was dismissed last September. In the meantime, a sort of "pay-and-pray" policy of throwing money at problems without addressing the root causes has come into play. Highly publicized and politicized lump payments have been doled out to pensioners and public-sector employees like teachers and doctors in the run-up to recent elections. "So far, the government is making the minimum payments necessary to buy the loyalty of the pensioners," Gartung said.

In December 2007, the average basic state pension was 3,309 rubles, or about $135, per month, an increase of more than 16 percent from the beginning of 2006. And emergency measures introduced before the Duma elections last year to freeze prices artificially on basic goods were just another short-term attempt at dealing with complex issues. "It is completely political," Gartung said. "This has nothing to do with economics."

The Projects

In his state of the nation address in 2005, Putin started what would become the defining social initiatives of his second term -- the national projects. Supporters of the projects say they have already addressed structural issues and made a concrete difference in the areas of education, health care, housing and agriculture over the last two-plus years. "The most important element is that, for the first time, there is now a strategy," said Alexandra Ochirova, who serves on Medvedev's committee for the national projects and heads the commission for social development in the Public Chamber. Guriyev agreed, saying improvements, like connecting all Russian schools to the Internet, were proof of progress. "Even throwing money at education and health care is a good idea because these were previously so underfinanced," said Guriyev, who served on a committee advising the government on the national projects.

But far from a great white hope, others see the projects as a white elephant, aimed only at generating superficial successes and photo opportunities, and reinforcing traditions of haphazard spending. Some argue that the projects are so ill-conceived that they have done more harm than good. "I remember from childhood the story about the man who turned everything he touched to gold," Smolin, the Communist Duma deputy said. "Well, the national projects seem to turn everything they touch into quite a different substance."

With the introduction of the national projects, he said, speculation on real estate sent prices soaring, and life expectancy has actually dropped. With regard to education, Smolin said that under Putin quality has plummeted, bureaucracy soared and the number of free-of-charge spots fallen. "Twenty-eight percent of Russians think that the sun revolves around the earth. In other words, they live in a pre-Copernican age," he said. "And 30 percent of Russians think that if you boil radioactive milk, the radiation will disappear."

"These are the dazzling results of our national projects," he said. In health care, despite some improvements, a bribe-for-treatment system is still prevalent, and the lack of facilities makes receiving proper treatment outside of large cities a lottery. "We need huge health care reform to meet the challenges," said Kirill Danishevsky, lead consultant at the Open Health Institute, a Moscow-based nongovernmental organization. "You don't solve this just by buying more ambulances."

The Moscow Times reports:

A leading human rights activist, Lev Ponomaryov, said Monday that he had been charged with slander for calling the country's top prison official "the author of a sadistic system of torture." Moscow prosecutors visited Ponomaryov at his home Thursday and initially questioned him "as a witness," Ponomaryov said. "It soon became clear that I would turn into a suspect," he said.

Ponomaryov said he was charged with falsely accusing a civil servant of committing a serious crime, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in prison. The prosecutors also asked Ponomaryov to sign a document agreeing not to leave Moscow for the duration of the investigation, which he did. The case dates back to a 2006 interview that Ponomaryov gave to the Regnum news agency. In the interview, Ponomaryov called Federal Prison Service chief Yury Kalinin "the author of a sadistic system of torture" and said he was responsible for a network of 40 prisons that were effectively "torture zones." Kalinin filed a complaint, and in April Moscow's Presnensky District Court ordered Regnum to publish a correction, which it did in October.

With the case apparently over, it was unclear as to why the prosecutors had charged Ponomaryov. Calls to prosecutors and the Federal Prison Service went unanswered Monday, a public holiday. The country's Kremlin-nominated human rights ombudsman, Vladimir Lukin, also called the conditions in many prisons "close to torture" in a report published earlier this month. Ponomaryov said the charge against him was fabricated. "Kalinin is eager to show the new president that he is indispensable to the regime," he said.

Dmitry Medvedev, President Vladimir Putin's handpicked successor, is expected easily to win Sunday's presidential election.

Ponomaryov, 67, is one of Russia's most prominent activists and is especially vocal on the treatment of prisoners. A former State Duma deputy, he is the executive director of the For Human Rights group and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group. Ponomaryov has attended many opposition rallies and has been detained numerous times. He said he intended to participate in a postelection Dissenters' March on Monday. Ponomaryov had a run-in with authorities in June, when he was questioned by Federal Security Service officials over a speech he made at a January 2007 rally in defense of two businesspeople accused of illegal trafficking of ethyl ether.

Putin in 2006 signed a law allowing the slander and libel of government officials to be classified as extremism. A series of cases has followed. A Perm reporter was questioned last week and may face charges after he wrote an article identifying what he characterized as positive similarities between Putin and Adolf Hitler. In September, Saratov prosecutors charged Sergei Mikhailov with extremism after his newspaper, The Saratov Reporter, published a photo portraying Putin as the popular fictional spy Otto von Stirlitz. The charges were dropped earlier this month. Ivanovo journalist Vladimir Rakhmankov was convicted in October 2006 of publicly insulting a public official and fined 20,000 rubles ($750) for referring to Putin as "a phallic symbol."

The BBC reports:

I was irritated by his three-piece suit. I was irritated by his floppy bow tie. But if I am honest, what really irritated me about Toomas Ilves was the fact that he and I had started off in almost the same job and I had become "our own correspondent" while he had become a head of state. Do not get me wrong, I love what I do. But arriving at the pad he occupies as president of Estonia - a charming little salmon-and-cream-cheese-coloured mansion in a park built for Peter the Great - I could not help feeling a twinge of envy.

It was not the kind of home either of us could have imagined in the late 1980s when I was a talks writer in the Russian section of the BBC World Service, and he was something similar in the Estonian section of Radio Free Europe. And it was not the kind of house I ever got. So when I had nodded at - and been ignored by - the white-gloved ceremonial guards on my way in, I am afraid I was a little less courteous to him than he was to me.

Why, I asked, did he not speak Russian? It seemed a reasonable question because Russian is the language of more than a quarter of Estonia's population. But for President Ilves it was not reasonable at all. Speaking Russian, he said firmly, would mean accepting 50 years of Soviet brutalisation because most Russian-speakers settled in Estonia only after it was occupied by the USSR towards the end of World War II. And when I pressed him, saying surely it would only mean being able to communicate with a large number of his fellow countrymen in their own language, he replied - as heads of state have every right to do: "This is a real dead end, I don't want to discuss it."

I moved on. And we had another cup of tea.

Bitter row

But Estonia's relations with Russia have reached something of a dead end since a bitter row last year over the moving of a monument. For Russians, the bronze statue of a Soviet soldier was a symbol of sacrifice, commemorating Estonia's liberation from Nazi Germany. For Estonians it was a symbol of slavery, reminding them of the Soviet domination that followed. Last April, when the Estonian government ordered it to be moved from a central square in the capital Tallinn to a military cemetery, protests by local Russians degenerated into riots. Russia accused Estonia of blasphemy and threatened "serious measures" in response.

What followed was a partial Russian trade blockade of Estonia and - far more chilling - an extraordinary cyber-attack. Millions of malicious messages were sent to Estonian websites and almost succeeded in disabling the country's entire computer network. The messages were in Russian and mostly accused Estonians of being fascists. There is no proof the Kremlin was behind them or behind the riots.

But President Ilves believes Moscow loses no opportunity to meddle in the affairs of his tiny country. Indeed as a former radio journalist, he was keen to quote me a weighty think-tank report that suggests the Kremlin is trying to divide and rule the whole of Europe. As a former talks writer from a more Russophile background, I was more inclined to give the Kremlin the benefit of the doubt.

Russian perspective

But my views changed a bit when I got to the Kremlin itself.

I found myself soon afterwards in a grand office behind its intimidating red-brick walls, looking out over the psychedelic onion domes of St Basil's Cathedral and taking tea with President Vladimir Putin's foreign policy adviser, Sergei Prikhodko. He was so disgusted by the moving of the bronze soldier statue that he could not bring himself to say anything else at all about Estonia. But he would talk about relations with another neighbour, Georgia.

'Punishment'

Georgia has also accused Russia of meddling. And it has also found itself the victim of swingeing trade sanctions. Why, I asked, were they necessary? "Georgia," Mr Prikhodko growled back, "can't always be like a little boy that takes a fork or a hammer and tries to whack its neighbour. Even a small child knows that if you spill tea or mess up your bed, you might be punished."

Small child? Punishment?

I was quite taken aback, in such a lofty setting, to hear those sentiments expressed so crudely. And I was bound to assume that Estonia is also regarded as a small child that needs punishing. If that is Russia's attitude, President Ilves' desire to turn his back on it seems altogether easier to understand. Of course, I know he has always looked west when I have been looking east. From Radio Free Europe he went to Washington - as Estonian ambassador - while I had gone from the World Service to the BBC News bureau in Moscow. Whether or not that is the secret of his success, I do not know. But turning westwards certainly has not done Toomas Ilves, or his country, any harm.

And I think now I can get over him having such a nice little palace.

Amnesty International has issued a new country report on Russia. You can download the report in HTML or PDF. Here's the executive summary:

There has been a clampdown on the freedoms of assembly and expression in the run-up to parliamentary and presidential elections in the Russian Federation. The authorities have violently dispersed some opposition demonstrations, while pro-government events have gone ahead without interference. Human rights activists and journalists who monitored demonstrations and public meetings have been harassed by law enforcement bodies. The space to express critical views in the Russian Federation has been gradually and progressively curtailed in recent years, according to a new Amnesty International report. The report "Freedom limited. The right to freedom of expression in the Russian Federation" examines the effect of arbitrary interpretation of vague legislation. It reveals increasing harassment of people in the Russian Federation seeking to express their opinions and to stand up for their rights.

"The rights to freedom of expression, assembly and association are a cornerstone for a functioning civil society. The Russian authorities are curtailing these rights as part of their strategy to counter so-called western influence," said Nicola Duckworth, Europe and Central Asia Programme Director at Amnesty International. "In doing so, they fail their national and international obligations to guarantee these rights for all."

In a country where TV and many other media outlets are controlled by the state, there is less and less space for independent reporting. Those journalists who attempt to report independently are obstructed from conducting their professional work and they may face intimidation and possibly prosecution. The radio station Ekho Moskvy has repeatedly been asked to provide transcripts of their programmes to the prosecutor's office in relation to preliminary investigations into allegations that they had aired extremists' views.

The investigation into the murder of human rights journalist Anna Politkovskaya appears to be making no progress in determining who ordered the killing. The 2006 law on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), with its burdensome reporting requirements, is one of the legal instruments being used to target some organizations seen as a threat to state authority. Many NGOs now find themselves entangled in bureaucratic procedures set by the authorities. This takes valuable time away from their real work without adding to the fulfilment of the NGO law's stated aims, to make them more accountable to society.

Other legal instruments used against human rights activists, independent organizations and media include the 2002 law to combat extremist activities, the tax law and the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Golos (Voice), an NGO working to promote fair elections and conducting training for election observers, is involved in a legal battle to prevent the closure of its branch in Samara. Rainbow House, an NGO of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights activists, was denied registration. Before that, the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society, which collected and distributed information about the human rights situation in Chechnya and other parts of the Russian Federation, was closed down. "Freedom of expression is first and foremost the freedom to express alternative viewpoints. The continuing attack on this right, including by restrictions to the rights to freedom of assembly and association, has a stifling effect on the whole society,” Nicola Duckworth said.

"Without the right to freedom of expression, other basic human rights may be violated more easily. Silence is the best breeding ground for impunity – a powerful tool to undermine the rule of law."

(1) Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Putin via Essel, Part 6

(2) EDITORIAL: Russia and Kosovo

(3) Goble Remembers the Chechen Genocide

(4) The Horror of Russian "Health Care"

(5) Lying to President Putin

(6) Putin's Russia: World Leader (in Teen Suicide, Abortion and Divorce)

(7) According to Russia's G-8 Peers, It's a Menace

NOTE: On Publius Pundit, a new low in the annals of Russian barbarism. Not for those with weak stomachs. Yech.

NOTE: We previously reported that Russia was up to for two Academy Awards last Sunday, best foreign language film and best animated short subject. The voters rejected it both times and, as if to put the boot in, gave the animated award to a British film on a Russian subject, Peter and the Wolf. Ouch.

NOTE: This is the sixth part of a serialized translation of Boris Nemtsov's white paper critiquing the Putin years. It includes the ninth chapter of the work. Part 1 (introduction and chapter one) appeared last Monday, then Part 2 (chapter two) on Wednesday, Part 3 (chapters three and four) appeared on Friday, Part 4 (chapters five and six) appeared on Sunday and Part 5 (chapters seven and eight) appeared on Monday. Look for Part 7 (chapters ten and eleven) on Friday with the final installment including the conclusion to follow on Sunday. You can display all the parts in reverse sequence on a single web page by simply clicking the "nemtsov white paper" link at the bottom of this post.

The entire translated white paper document, including the final sections not yet published here as HTML, is now available as PDF (this link is now also permanently in our sidebar).

Putin: the Bottom Line

by Boris Nemtsov

First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, 1997-1998

and

Vladimir Milov

Deputy Minister of Energy, 2002

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Chapter 9

Surrounded by Enemies (but not China)

Under Putin, Russia has managed to quarrel or get on bad terms for no good reason with most of the countries around it. It has no friends or allies left. We are moving at an ever faster pace towards being one of those countries that is excluded from the taking of international decisions.

Russia’s relations with all the Western countries have deteriorated for no good reason at all. The West is our natural partner and is open to the idea of cooperation with Russia. No matter how hard the opponents of integration with the West try to turn us into an Asian country, Russia remains an organic part of European civilisation. The Western path of open democratic society and market economy is the only good way for us to develop along as it ensures a high standard of living for the people (the oil-rich Arab kingdoms with the tiny populations do not count). The Western democracies are what threaten Russia the least. Those countries have never attacked any other democratic country. The government believes that our main opponent is the USA although that country has never attacked Russia and has been our ally in every one of our wars. The governments of the West are playing the lead part in the establishment of the new world order which has been taking shape since the end of World War II. The Marshall Plan’s restoration of war-ruined Western Europe, which turned it into flourishing example for the rest of the world, was the fruit of the transatlantic alliance between Europe and the USA. Russia’s strategic plan should be to be to join this alliance.

Not everything is as simple in our relations with the West. There is much to complain about in their actions – for example, how in the 1990s they forced a starving Russia to take upon itself the Soviet debt of over $90 billion, and how in recent times we have seen the War in Iraq and the deployment of American anti-missile missiles in Europe.

President Putin, however, has completely forgotten how to use the instruments of civilised dialogue and gone over to pure confrontationism and provocations. For example, the USA announced back in 2001 that it would withdraw from the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty but from that time on no move has been made to enter into negotiations and sign a new one. Ever stubborn old Soviet leaders like Brezhnev and Gromyko would have done that. Putin just allowed things to slide. Now the hands of the USA are untied and it us who have to deal with the consequences of the deployment of American anti-missile missiles in Europe, the opportunity to have reached and agreement with the American in 2002-2005 having been missed.

Putin has tried to cover up his diplomatic failures by making use of provocations: energy blackmail, provocative bomber flights up to NATO’s frontiers (as if it would have been impossible to carry out training flights over international waters), hysterical anti-Western propaganda. Around the world, it is becoming normal to fear Russia, to look for ways to protect against ‘the Russian threat”.

Why do we need this confrontation? No one in the West is looking to go to war with Russia and we cannot afford one anyway. An arms race will ruin Russia, a country accounting for 2% of world GDP, when the USA’s GDP accounts for 27% [1](America’s economy is over 10 times the size of Russia’s). A new state of confrontation can only be maintained at the cost of reduced pensions, smaller salaries for teachers and doctors, and the introduction of ruinous taxes on businesses.

Cooling relations and Russia’s slow slide into isolation reduces opportunities for Russians to travel freely abroad. It is harder for our citizens than those of any other European country to obtain, for example, a Schengen visa. Meanwhile, the citizens of democratic countries travel to and from each others’ countries without any visas at all. Incidentally, our leaders’ anti-Western rhetoric does not stop their families from living and studying in the “enemy” states. For example, the daughter of Minister of Foreign Affairs Lavrov, who has distinguished himself in the field of aggressive anti-Western declarations and been a major contributor to the worsening of relations with the United Kingdom, does not study in Russia but at the London School of Economics [2].

The current confrontation with the West is the sorry result of non-professionals with Soviet instincts who do not know how to start a reasonable dialogue coming to power in the country, of the degradation of our diplomacy. Putin quite fails to understand the nature of the world’s current feelings about Russia. Official propaganda spreads the idea that Russia is no longer respected these days. That is not so. We have ceased to be respected and are feared instead, as people fear the psychologically unbalanced. We have stopped being considered thoughtful, reasonable and sober partners. Who knows what tricks Putin will get up to next – another energy embargo, more bomber flights? This is not authority, this is just fear. Russia does not need this kind of “popularity”.

Russia has quarreled with all its CIS neighbours. Putin has to all intents and purposes destroyed the Commonwealth. Gross interference in the Ukrainian elections, the embargoes against Georgia and Moldavia, energy blackmail in Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic countries, blocking Central Asian oil and gas from access to international markets. We have been in one conflict or other with all the post-Soviet countries. Russian influence in the post-Soviet sphere has fallen sharply. Given our colonial attitudes, it is not surprising that many of our former socialist-camp neighbours have looked to the West for aid and support.

Putin’s “integration projects” have not been successful: nothing has come of the Single Economic Area or of the Customs’ Union. One after the other, the post-Soviet countries have overtaken us and joined the WTO. Russia’s best friend, Kazakhstan’s President Nazarbayev travels to Washington, Brussels, Peking, with promises of cooperation. Azerbaidzhan has declined to buy Russian gas and to use our pipelines to transport its oil. It is also preparing to join NATO. Relations have cooled even with Armenia, for whom we raised gas prices and which cannot but suffer too from Putin’s transport blockade of Georgia.

Yet an alternative strategy for Russia exists. We need to become the guarantor of the spread of freedom and democracy in the post-Soviet arena, to be setting the standards for democracy for other post-Soviet countries to follow, to refrain from colonial policies, to build our relationships with our partners principled equality and not by trying to engulf the whole territory of the former USSR in a Gazprom monopoly. Only in this way can Russia become not only the greatest authority in the CIS but an effective defender of the rights of of the Russian-speaking minorities in those countries.

For now, however, our neighbours are busy building barriers against us.

Back in 2000, Russia was on reasonable terms with nearly all the world’s countries. Today we are ringed by enemies. The only exception to this is China.

Putin’s policies towards China should rightly be called “capitulatory”. Under Putin, Russia’s military-industrial complex has mostly worked to arm the Chinese. Russia has become the top supplier to China’s armed forces as they rapidly grow in might. We have sold minesweepers, aircraft, submarines, air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles to China. Putin has even allowed Chinese military units into Russia to carry out military exercises: 1600 Chinese servicemen entered Chelyabinsk district in 2007 for this purpose. With Putin’s connivance, China has hastened to extend its influence in Central Asia, leaving Russia sidelined. The Central Asia countries are building new oil and gas pipelines to China, developing transport links, and getting massive financial assistance from the Chinese government. As for Russia, “higher” geopolitical considerations prompt us to sign loss-leading contracts for the sale of oil and gas to China at prices several times lower than world prices.

Putin has made major territorial concessions to China. Russian territory has been ceded to another country for the first time since Nikita Khrushchev. By a 2004 treaty, China was given two large Russian islands on our borders, Bolshoi Ussuriisky Island and Tarabarova Island. The area ceded is nearly 340 square kilometres. A massive building project for a town of 2½ million inhabitants is today underway on Bolshoi Ussuriisky Island. Khabarovsk can clearly be seen from the island, which is now set to become an outpost of the Chinese economy and cultural expansion in the Far East.

China represents a real threat to our country. Unlike the countries of the West, China does lay open and unconcealed claims to Russian territory. At the very time when former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was being falsely reported as having said that “Russia doe not rightly own Siberia” (a Russian general admitted in an interview with Rossiiskaya Gazeta in 2006 that the quote had been invented), Chinese politicians were openly commenting that Eastern Siberia and the Russian Far East had been “unfairly seized” by Tsarist Russia. Chinese history and geography schoolbooks teach children to think in this way. Maps with our Eastern territories coloured in the same colour as China are on free sale in the country.

Putin and other representatives of the pro-Chinese lobby try to sweet-talk us with statements that “China does not present a danger” to Russia. These assertions are without substance. On the contrary, any analysis of the real situation can only conclude that while the Communists remain in power in China, that country will be a direct threat to our security. We have a real armed conflict behind us already – in 1969, one resulted from Chinese claims to the Daman Island. China’s armed forces are already outnumber ours and they out-arm us in all forms of weaponry except strategic. China today has about 700 tactical rockets with a range of 300-600kms which can easily be transported to our border and used to strike Khabarovsk, Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Vladivostok, Chita… And we cannot begin to compete with China in numbers of men we can mobilise in the event of a military conflict.

In 2006, the Chinese army carried out large-scale exercises in the Peking and Shenyang military districts to try out a strategic advance operation in which troops were to advance over 1000 kilometres overland in large numbers. Against whom could China be considering such an operation? Clearly not against Taiwan, Japan or the USA: maritime landings would be needed for such operations. Military specialists could only see in such an exercise preparation for a land operation on Russian territory.

Putin has signed an agreement creating a 200-kilometre troop-free zone along the frontier that is only to China’s advantage: in Eastern Siberia and the Far East all our infrastructure and communications are located along the border with China and this leaves them undefended. Our armed forces are not prepared for an armed conflict with China. The Ministry of Defence’s main scenario for the Far East theatre, which our army does train for, is one in which a maritime descent force (from the US or Japan) is repulsed. We are simply not prepared to handle a large-scale land operation by Chinese forces using air and rocket support.

Russia’s armed forces are as unready to repulse possible aggression from the Southeast as it was unready to deal with aggression from the West in 1941.

One would like to hope that there will not be any confrontation between Russia and China at any time in the future. But who knows what the Chinese Communists have in their minds. “Conceal your true intentions”, Deng Xiaoping used to teach. We need to be reliably defended from a potential Chinese threat. Under Putin, however, all we have seen are some very one-sided concessions to China that a very much not to our advantage.

In a recent interview he gave to American journalists, Putin accused the Russian opposition of playing into the hands of foreign powers. However, his own actions and the fact that he has permitted the abandonment of Russian interests unprecedented in the last 50 years or so make him look like he is a Chinese agent of influence in Russia.

We gained nothing from our unilateral concessions to China. Our government’s aggressive and unconstructive behaviour is leading to Russia’s exclusion from the processes whereby vital decisions are reached by a wide circle of countries worldwide. We have quarreled with the West but we are not welcome in the East.

This is the consequence of stupid and unprofessional foreign policies. While defending its interests, Russia should not forget that one still needs to cooperate, to support good-neighbourly relations with other countries, and to work jointly with others to resolve global problems. The confrontation with the West that has been forced upon us, neocolonialism, and capricious foreign policy lines must be abandoned in favour of a wise and balanced approach to foreign affairs, of a sober evaluation of the real threats facing Russia, and a review of the policy of backing down to China. It is only if we act in this way that Russia will truly be respected.

Paul Goble reports:

February 23rd was the 64th anniversary of Stalin’s deportation of the Chechens and Ingush from their homelands in the North Caucasus to the wilds of Central Asia, an act of genocide in which more than half of those sent east lost their lives and one that lies behind many of the recent tragedies in that part of the world. But instead of marking this event in a way that ensures that it is properly described and will never happen again, Russian officials and the international community have ignored this crime against humanity, leaving it unlike some other acts of genocide to be remembered by those who were its immediate victims or their descendents.

Except for a few news reports about what the Chechens and Ingush were doing and passing references to this genocide in more general stories about the region, the only comment generated by a Google News search today was a letter to The Times of London. This current neglect is triply unfortunate. First of all, it allows the current Russian government to continue its repression of the Chechens, Ingush and other “persons of the Caucasus” by relying on the false but widely believed charges that they fought or wanted to fight on the side of Hitler and thus deserved and deserve what they get.

In the last 50 days alone, Russian nationalist skinheads have killed 28 non-Russians, many of whom are from the North Caucasus, a figure that is twice as high as the one for the same period in 2007 and greater than the annual numbers of such murders in 2004 and 2005. While the Russian authorities have occasionally moved to suppress this plague, it continues at least in part because many Russians who would never think about killing “persons of Caucasus nationality” nonetheless believe that such people are less deserving of protection than others, often on the basis of memories of Stalin’s charges against them. Second, this neglect makes it impossible for these Vainakh peoples to develop relationships with Moscow and the rest of the world that are based on something other than anger about what has been done to them and what the Russian authorities have not been prepared to compensate them for.

As one human rights activist in Ingushetia pointed out on Friday, the failure of Moscow to acknowledge and apologize for the deportation – even though the Russian Supreme Soviet did once admit that those events were a “crime” – continues to enflame Chechen and Ingush life. At a meeting in Grozny yesterday, Chechen officials pointed out that “as a result of the deportation died almost 70 percent of the Chechens,” a figure higher than most Western estimates and one that means that crime continues to touch almost all residents in that republic. One example of this: Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov has promised to help some 4,000 Chechens in Kyrgyzstan, who include both those deported and their descendants, to finally return home, something most other Chechens did after the death of Stalin.

And third, it is perhaps especially unfortunate because despite the contributions of scholars like Robert Conquest to the study of the 1944 tragedy, a large amount of new information has emerged that shows that Soviet actions in the North Caucasus were both more cynical and more racist than even most Western researchers have suggested. Much new research, including full texts of hitherto classified Stalin-era documents and statistics, is available. But particularly striking are the findings summarized in a new pamphlet issued by a Memorial researcher.

In a work entitled “The Deportation of the Ingush. Falsifications and Genuine Causes,” Mar’yam Yandiyeva provides a wealth of new information about that event and its pre-history, information that demonstrates the collaboration charges Moscow made against the Ingush and Chechens were spurious. On the one hand, she recounts, as early as 1934, Sergei Kirov, the Communist Party leader whom many view as a positive counterpart to Stalin and whose own murder in December of that year, opened the way to the Great Terror, responded to the complaints of Chechens and Ingush with truly chilling words. He said that these mount peoples “are by their genes counter- revolutionaries and anti-Soviets and that it is necessary to teach them a lesson.” Just what that “lesson” would be was shown in 1944, 1994, 1999, and even now on the streets of post-Soviet Moscow. And on the other hand, Yandiyeva reports, “already at the start of 1940” – 18 months before Hitler invaded the Soviet Union – “the USSR General Staff concluded that in the event of war,” it would be “strategically” important for Moscow to adopt “’special measures’” for the “unstable” southern regions of the country.

Those statements demonstrate that Stalin’s actions in 1944 were not a response to anything that the Chechens, Ingush or others might have done in the war but rather that the war provided the Soviet dictator and his regime with an opportunity to do what they had long wanted to. The full text of Yandiyev’s study is currently available on a website that Moscow has been trying to shut down. But even that is a good thing because – and this is perhaps the clearest indication of the world’s neglect of this genocide – she was able to print only 100 copies of her work.

The Chicago Tribune reports on the horror of so-called "health care" in Vladimir Putin's Russia (for more on this subject, check out Grigori Pasko on Robert Amsterdam):

Health care is supposed to be free in Russia, but Russians know that every hospital has its under-the-table price list.

That's why the family of Khazerya Ziyayetdinova, a 70-year-old woman suffering from severe bedsores, brought cash every time they visited her at Hospital 67 in Moscow. To have Ziyayetdinova recover in a room instead of the hallway, relatives slipped an orderly $300. They paid nurses $20 to give injections, change bedpans and unclog catheters. Every chat with Ziyayetdinova's doctor cost $40.

"Our health-care system is still in the Middle Ages," said Vera Pavlova, Ziyayetdinova's daughter-in-law, sitting in her home in this small town 54 miles southwest of Moscow. "There's low professionalism, corruption — it makes me very worried about finding myself in a situation where I might need medical treatment."

Russia is an unhealthy nation, and its health-care system is just as sick. Its hospitals are understaffed, poorly equipped and rife with corruption. The biggest reason Russia's population plummets at a rate of more than 700,000 people each year is not that its birthrate is so low, but that its death rate is so high. The average life expectancy for Russian men is 59. In the U.S. it's 75; in Japan it's 79. Alcohol and smoking are major culprits. Both are linked to heart disease, and in Russia, the rate of men ages 30 to 59 dying from heart disease is five times that of the United States, according to researchers at Columbia University.

Prevention and better health care can help reverse that trend. The Russian government is pumping $6.4 billion into revamping health care; much of that money is paying for the construction of eight high-tech medical centers across the country, new X-ray machines, electrocardiograms and ambulances at hospitals, and raises for family doctors. But doctors and nurses in the Russian Far East city of Amursk are still waiting for the overhaul to reach their hospital. In January 2007, the hospital ran out of syringes and asked patients to bring their own, said Olga Cherevko, a nurse at the hospital. Even something as fundamental as keeping pharmacies stocked can prove problematic for Russia's beleaguered health-care system. A bureaucratic breakdown in late 2006 led to a severe shortage in government-supplied prescription drugs.

Russians with enough money were able to buy medicine privately. But hundreds of thousands of Russians with high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma and other diseases had to do without the drugs for weeks. Russian officials have promised that the errors that led to the drug shortage won't happen again. They can't be as reassuring when it comes to corruption that demands bribes for everything from surgery to clean sheets. Researchers at the Russian Academy of Sciences' Open Health Institute estimate that corruption siphons off as much as 35 percent of money spent on health care. Low wages perpetuate the problem; yearly doctor salaries in Russia average $5,160 to $6,120. Nurses make an average of $2,760 to $3,780 annually. Pavlova estimates that Ziyayetdinova's family shelled out nearly $5,000 in bribes during the time Ziyayetdinova was hospitalized.

At a skin clinic in Moscow, nurses charged $20 each time they applied ointment to Ziyayetdinova's bedsores. One of her sons began sweeping up her ward during visits because a nurse said room cleanup was the responsibility of patients or their families—not hospital staff. The money never really helped. Ziyayetdinova died. Doctors said she died of a heart deficiency, but Pavlova and Ziyayetdinova's sons are convinced the indifference and neglect Ziyayetdinova endured during her hospitalization contributed to her death. "It was as if their goal wasn't to save someone's life," Pavlova said, "as if they thought their role was to be a last stage before death. To be a place that prepares a person to die."

Alexander Golts, writing in the Moscow Times, shows that the biggest problem with being a thuggish dictator is that people will be afraid to tell you the truth. Thus, with every day that passes you are living more and more in a world of illusion, surrounded by sycophants who will do nothing to alert you of problems that need fixing because to do so might risk their careers or even their lives. Welcome back to the USSR:

When I listened to a televised report of President Vladimir Putin's visit Wednesday to the Gromov Flight Research Institute, Russia's main flight-test center in the Moscow region, I couldn't believe what I was hearing. Not only did the institute's staff give a demonstration of the Su-35 -- which they referred to as the "very latest" fighter aircraft in the Russian arsenal -- but they informed the president that it had undergone its first test flight only the day before. Before an audience of millions, they duped Putin in the most brazen manner. You can easily open any encyclopedia of military aircraft and see for yourself that the Su-35 took its maiden flight 20 years ago. Twelve Su-35s were built by the mid-1990s, and now they are telling Putin that another 12 Su-35s are currently undergoing test flights. I strongly suspect that these are the same aircraft that have been around for more than a decade.

This story may be a precursor to what we can expect from a government that promises to build an "innovative army" by 2020 to which Putin referred in a speech before the State Council on Feb. 8. Putin said the foundation for such an army would rest on the development over the next couple of years of "new types of arms that are equal to those held by other states -- and in some cases superior."

One year ago, then-Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov presented a list of the so-called latest weaponry that, according to Putin, would constitute the military's "innovative development." But none of the items on the list is new. Since the Topol-M missile was developed in the late 1980s, the technologies it employs will already be 30 years old in 2015. The Iskander missile was deployed in the early 1990s, and the same is true of the C-400 air defense system. The Su-34 fighter bomber is equally "new." By the time Russia's military technology finally reaches the production stage, it is already obsolete. Therefore, Putin's innovative army of 2020 will really be based on military technology that dates from the last century.

Most amazing is that Russia is playing military catch-up while other global powers such as the United States, Britain, France and even China are undergoing what defense experts call a revolution in military affairs. These countries were on the cutting edge of information-technology breakthroughs in the 1990s, and this allowed them to bring real-time battlefield data to commanders in the field -- whether on land, sea, air or space. The uncertainty about the enemy's battlefield movements -- which was once considered an inevitable aspect of armed conflict -- is now gradually dissipating thanks to these new information technologies. For example, witnesses on the ground tell me that there is now a constant noise from the buzzing engines of unpiloted aircraft in the skies over Afghanistan and Iraq. The drones carry video cameras that relay a bird's-eye view of any piece of territory a commander is assigned to manage. Every officer, right down to the level of a platoon commander, can view the activity in any conflict zone with the aid of a laptop computer. On a larger strategic level, these technologies provide complete and unchallengeable battlefield superiority.

But Russia has done practically nothing in this high-tech sphere. Ivanov, now first deputy prime minister, recently revealed the total failure of Russia's Global Navigation Satellite System. The program's creators had promised for the last decade that the system would give both civil and military users advanced positioning capabilities, which is clearly essential to the military's precision-weapons systems. It turned out that domestic industries could not manufacture all of the components necessary for the system. If the country's military brass were serious about creating an innovative army, they would focus their energies on information technologies.

Russia's military leadership established the post of deputy minister for computer science, but to get an idea of how useful this department will be, it is enough to read the report by Alexander Burutin, deputy chief of the General Staff: His definition of "information wars" is the threat of a hacker attack on the country's computer networks.

However you look at it, there is no basis for hoping that Russia will create the innovative army Putin has promised. This is because the Kremlin promises one thing, and the armed forces move in exactly the opposite direction. And for that matter, so does the rest of the country.

INTERFAX reports on the paradise that is Vladimir Putin's Russia:

Russia is the world's leader in lethal suicides among 15-19 year-old teenagers, the 12th World Russian People's Council resolution reads summing up the Council's work on Friday.

As to youth spiritual crisis, the forum's participants consider it necessary to adopt laws protecting children and youth from "consequences of moral crisis." Priority to be given to laws on public morals, video and computer games, children toys, teens free time organization and control, moral values in sexual relations, informative production harmful for teens morals, health and development. To motivate the defense of morality, the Council's participants have pointed out that Russia is facing a family crisis.

"This country is among leaders in divorces. According the UN Children Foundation, the number of non-marital children equaled to 30% in 2004," the document reads.

Besides, Russia overran the majority of countries for abortions as its number has recently exceeded the number of births. The underaged abortions make significant part of it and total to 4% among 15 year-old girls.

The resolution also notes that Russia holds the first place for abandoned children: every 38th child live in state orphanages, patron or foster families. Finally, Russia's murder rate is the highest in Europe (26 incidents for 100,000 people), the forum's participants state.

The BBC reports more evidence that Russia must be evicted from the G-8. When surveyed, residents of the G-8 nations believed Putin had done more harm than good to democracy, human rights and quality of life in Russia, and had been more detrimental than helpful to world peace and energy security. In a truly shocking result, the poll found that while only 26% of G-8 residents thought Putin had a positive impact on democracy and human rights, a whopping 64% of Russians thought so (interestingly, though, even Russians admitted this was Putin's weaknest characteristic). The poll also shows how poorly the Western press have been educating their populations about the horror of what is going on in Russia, since there were large numbers who could not answer and since 26% is still a frighteningly large number to think Putin's draconian crackdown on civil rights has been positive.

Most people in the G-7 leading industrialised countries have a negative view of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, a BBC poll suggests. Of 16,000 people questioned, 56% said he had had a harmful impact on democracy and human rights in Russia and on peace and security in the world. But in the remainder of the 30 countries covered by the poll, opinions of Mr Putin were more favourable. And in Russia itself, he was given overwhelmingly positive ratings.

The survey was carried out by polling organisations Globescan and The Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). There is little doubt that, in his eight years as Russian President, Vladimir Putin has had a considerable impact on the world stage, and inside Russia. How positively or negatively his legacy is viewed, though, depends on where you are in the world, according to the BBC World Service poll. But a key imponderable in viewing these results is also the extent to which one is indeed talking about a "legacy". Mr Putin is stepping down as president shortly. Just how much influence he will continue to wield, and in what precise capacity, remains a matter of great speculation.

Against the background of general unease among Western governments over the direction that Moscow has been taking recently under Mr Putin, the poll suggests that 56% of people in the world's seven leading industrialised countries think he has had a negative impact on democracy and human rights in Russia. Nearly half - 47% - also think his impact on international peace and security has been negative. Among the six western European countries polled, opinion was on the negative side generally. What is more, this poll did not include former Warsaw Pact countries in central and eastern Europe, where the attitudes of people towards Moscow are likely to be negative. Yet, despite a recent series of major diplomatic rows between Moscow and London, 45% of Britons polled had a positive view of Russia's world role.

In terms of the more broadly positive reactions overall among the 30 countries except Russia that were surveyed, this may be driven in part by a continuing view in many regions of the world that Russia represents a potential counterweight to the United States, The US is still widely seen as the dominant superpower, but whose foreign policy under the Bush administration has been especially controversial. So, beyond the major industrialised countries and the West, there may be less unease about - and perhaps even a welcoming of - a newly-assertive Russia.

The counterweight argument may be reflected in the very different results emerging in this survey from the Middle East - 78% of Egyptians view Russian influence as positive, only 29% of Israelis do. Egypt, of course, has a long history of close ties to Russia, even though the current Egyptian government is close to Washington. Strikingly, in terms of Russia's and Mr Putin's world roles, the Chinese are very positive. That may be because the Chinese feel a common bond with the Russians as part of a camp that seeks to check US influence, and reassert a multi-polar world. Still, the scale of some of the results is surprising - 69% of the Chinese surveyed see Russia playing a positive international role. Beijing has certainly developed a relationship with Moscow, but only up to a point, and the two are themselves still potential rivals.

Significantly, Russians in this survey give Mr Putin high approval ratings on all the issues raised - including democracy, human rights, and quality of life in the country, as well as on the international stage. And, for Mr Putin himself, these may be the most telling results.

(1) Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Putin via Essel, Part 5

(2) EDITORIAL: Listening to Lev

(3) Annals of Kozlovsky: Moving on to the Next Victim

(4) Annals of Putin's war on NGOs

(5) The Amsterdam Video Returns

(6) The Elections Charade: Neo-Soviet Barbarism in all its Horror

(7) Annals of Shamapova

NOTE: The New York Times ran a devastating long front-page article on its website on Sunday with the synoposis: "A new autocracy now governs Russia. Behind a facade of democracy lies a centralized authority that is not reluctant to swat down those who challenge the ruling party." It included both a photo spread and, best of all, a translation of a series of barbaric comments from "Russian readers" based on a translation of the article on a special Russian-language website the paper has created. The article is part of a forthcoming series entitled "Kremlin rules" which "will examine the crackdown in Russia under President Vladmir V. Putin." More proof of how devastatingly "president" Putin has won respect for Russia in the West. We congratulate the Times on finally deciding to do what we've been doing for nearly two years now. Maybe one day soon it will see fit to write something about Oleg Kozlovsky!

NOTE: The BBC has a two-part audio file in which reporter Tim Whewell exposes the extent to which Russian dictator Vladimir Putin has isolated Russia from the civilized nations of the world and is using Russia's energy resources the way the USSR used its military resources -- thus giving rise to a new cold war.

NOTE: This is the fifth part of a serialized translation of Boris Nemtsov's white paper critiquing the Putin years. It includes the seventh and eighth chapters of the work. Part 1 (introduction and chapter one) appeared on Monday, Part 2 (chapter two) on Wednesday, Part 3 (chapters three and four) appeared on Friday and Part 4 (chapters five and six) appeared on Sunday. look for Part 6, which may be the final installment, on Wednesday. You can display all the parts in reverse sequence on a single web page by simply clicking the "nemtsov white paper" link at the bottom of this post.

Putin: the Bottom Line

by Boris Nemtsov

First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, 1997-1998

and

Vladimir Milov

Deputy Minister of Energy, 2002

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Chapter 7

Flouting the Constitution

By refraining from putting himself up for a third term as president, Putin is pretending that he is keen to observe the Russian Constitution. In reality, however, its main provisions were all trampled into the dust long ago. The Russian Constitution has to all intents and purposes ceased to mean anything.

First and foremost, Russia is no longer either a democratic, or a federative, or a law-governed state as per Article 1 of the document.

Russia is no longer a democracy. Putin has deprived Russians of freedom of speech and free access to information. We are talking here of the imposition of censorship on practically all politically significant media – federal television channels, wide circulation newspapers, and the most visited internet sites. Article 29 of the Constitution guarantees every citizen freedom of thought and speech, the right freely to seek, get, transfer, produce and disseminate information by any lawful means. However, the state has seized control of the influential mass media, closed down the independent television channels, introduced shameful blacklists of people who are not deemed suitable and thus not allowed to appear on television, and made it impossible for citizens to get hold of truthful information about what is happening in the country and in the world. People are engulfed from morning until night by a wave of lying propaganda and panegyrics to the authorities that has already caused a gross warping of public opinion. Many seriously believe that without “our dear master Putin” the country will come to an end, even though just nine years ago no one had ever heard of the man. People support “Putin’s plan” although they have no idea what it consists of. Confrontational thinking and hatred of heterodoxy and of “enemies” are being promoted.

Throughout all this, no one is telling the people that their real enemies are those who, during what could have been prosperous years for the country, have made social and economic reforms fail and not used the shower of gold deriving from oil to create a workable army and build roads, have spoilt relations with the rest of the world, and handed over Russian territory to China. Censorship thrives in all the main media although Article 29 of the Constitution totally unambiguously states that censorship shall be prohibited.

Most frightening of all is that the murder of journalists in Russia ( and not one of these crimes has been resolved), first and foremost that of Anna Politkovskaya, has led to self-censorship among journalists as they fear to write about serious problems or to criticise the authorities. It could get them killed. Notwithstanding the upsurge in spending on security and law enforcement between 2000 and 2007 not a single major murder case, of which there were no fewer than in the 1990s, has been resolved.

These are all things that the opposition would have talked about. Putin, however, has put it under a tight political lid. Although Article 13 of the Constitution guaranties ideological and political plurality and a multi-party system and Article 30 promises freedom of to form and participate in opposition unions, such unions are to all intents and purposes forbidden. It is made impossible for independent parties that do not agree with the Kremlin’s policies to register themselves and take part in elections. Anyone who criticises the government can, thanks to a new police law on extremism, be declared an extremist and find himself behind bars.

Article 30 of the Constitution guarantees citizens the right to hold gatherings, meetings, and demonstrations and to march and picket. However, this right is practically impossible to implement in practice. Opposition meetings are banned and violently dispersed by the OMON armed riot police. It has become the norm for people at peaceful demonstrations to be beaten and arrested.

The abolition of the election of governors and also to the State Duma from single-mandate districts struck a decisive blow against the right of Russians to elect and be elected. Previously, Russian could directly elect civil servants at all levels of government – governors, State Duma representatives, and regional Legislatures. Now, practically the only election left is the presidential election. The lists for State Duma representatives and regional parliaments are drawn up in the Kremlin and there is a new fashion for the “locomotives” – well-known people who are put at the top of the party lists – to decline to take up their mandates, allowing others, people who were not known to or voted for by the electorate, to become representatives.

The people, who according to Chapter 1 of the Constitution are the vehicle of sovereignty and the only source of power in the Russian Federation, have been shoved aside and stopped from electing their government by direct vote.

Russia is no longer a federation. The exclusion of governors from the Federation Council, the abolition of elections for governors so that they are appointed instead from amongst candidates proposed by the president, the redistribution of budget income in favour of the centre – these are all innovations introduced during Putin’s rule in order by design to destroy the foundations of federalism in the country. As a result, the regions have been left lacking adequate financial resources for resolving their pressing development problems.

The abolition of the election of governors is a direct flouting of the Constitution. By a decree of 16 January 1996 regarding the organs of power in the Altai Republic, Russia’s Constitutional Court recognised that governors must be elected by direct popular vote. This decree has force of law. Putin, however, has broken this principle, basely using the opportunity afforded by the Russian public’s state of depression following the Beslan tragedy. But what, you may ask, is the link between Chechen terrorists and the election of leaders in Yakutia or Penza District?

By a decision dated 21 December 2005, the Constitutional Court ruled that Putin’s actions, with reference to the “developing socio-historical context”, were lawful. Can it be that “context” is of greater import than legal norms and that the Constitution in Russia is to be interpreted each time anew, depending on the “context”?

That the Constitutional Court should bend over for the executive comes as no surprise. During Putin’s rule, the central principle of the Constitution, that of the separation of powers, has been totally done away with. The principle of independence from each other of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary enshrined in Article 10 of the Constitution is there because it is vital that no one branch of government should be able to usurp power in the country.

But this principle has been trampled upon. Parliament has been turned into the “legislative department of the Presidential Administration”; its members are appointed by the Kremlin and vote according to the Kremlin’s wishes. The courts are totally dependent on the executive even though Article 120 states that judges shall be independent and shall obey only the Constitution of the Russian Federation and the federal law. Basman justice is dispensed throughout the land. Russia is no longer a law-governed state.

Although point 4 of the Constitution's third article states that no one may arrogate to himself power in the Russian Federation, Putin’s inner circle has to all intents and purposes seized it. Putin has twice broken his presidential oath to obey the Russian Constitution. The Constitution is still formally in place but in fact its main points have been broken. It is precisely because the Constitution has been turned into a worthless scrap of paper that Putin has kept his word that he would not make changes to it.

We need to restore the power of the Constitution in Russia. Restore freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of political parties and of an opposition to operate. Restore the right of the people to elect their government, to elect governors, and to elect representatives to the State Duma in single-mandate districts. Restore the independence of justice.

Chapter 8

The Collapse of the "National Projects"

“National Projects” were invented by the government to counterbalance the failure of their reforms in the social sphere. Compulsory health insurance, social security, and education reforms were all discussed back in 2000. They failed to materialise and it was decided to camouflage this failure with noise about “national projects”.

In and of themselves, these national projects are quite sensible. It’s good that the government should allocate at least some money to developing medicine, education, housing, and agriculture. But if one looks at what could really have been done by the government, the pittance allocated is mere crumbs off the table. In 2006, just $6 billion were made available. This rose to $10 billion in 2007 with $12 billion planned for 2008. Sibneft was bought from Abramovich for more than the yearly allocation to all the “national projects”.

Despite all the noise made about the “national projects”, the proportion of the budget going to health, education, and the social services has actually been falling in recent years. In 2007, expenditure planned for public health and education amounted to 9% of the federal budget. For 2008, the three-year budget for 2008-2010 is allocating 8% of the federal budget and this will go down to just 7.5% in 2009.

On the other hand, the government is planning to direct 16% of the federal budget to state management and security. Under Putin, we have seen an explosive growth in the money spent on the bureaucracy and the special services: in 2000, these cost the country $4 billion but $39 billion will go to them in 2008 – 3 times more than will be spent on all the “national projects”!

The special services and Abramovich are Putin’s real “national projects”.

In essence the “national projects” represent the replacement of systematic reform by random, one-off, modest injections of cash which do not really solve anything. For example, only a quarter of the funds allocated to the “Health” national project will be used to purchase diagnostic equipment for municipal polyclinics and the building of new high-tech medical centres (of which only 15 are planned for the whole country); the rest is to be spent on general expenses. It is good that doctors should get salary increases and that new equipment be bought for medical institutions. But it was only the salaries of general practitioners and junior medical personnel that were raised, not those of the specialists who actually do the most when it comes to curing people. The purchasing of medical equipment is being carried out in a random and selective manner. Instead of creating a working medical insurance system and defining the compulsory minimum levels of medical care that citizens can expect, the government wants to fob the people off with quick little cash injections.

It will come as no surprise that the “national projects” have disappointed.

The “Health” national project

Despite the fact that the lion’s share of the money allocated to all the “national projects’ has been to this one ($5 billion of the $10 billion total for 2007), the quality of health care in Russia has not improved. Data collected by the Levada-Centre shows that only 14% of Russians are satisfied with the health care they receive while 72% think that the quality of health care in Russia has either remained static or deteriorated. There are figures to confirm this: according to data from Rosstat, sickness rates per 1000 of population have been on the increase since the year 2000. This predicates the persisting high death rate (see the chapter on Russia dying out). The system for financing cheap prescriptions is bankrupt and medicine prices continue to rise. Medical care in Russia is a choice between atrociously low quality or extremely expensive.

The “Affordable Housing” national project

Housing has become less and less affordable during the runtime of this project. Back in summer 2005, the cost of a standard 54m2 flat equivalated to 4.3 years’ average income of a family of three . Now it’s 5.3 years. The project should be renamed the “unaffordable housing project”. According to Rosstat data, the average price of a square metre of housing on the resale market has more than doubled during the existence of this national project, from 21 thousand to 45 thousand rubles from summer of 2005 to today!

The reason for rising house prices is not because the government has allocated too little money to construction or that the president did not give the civil servants a needed shove at the right time. It is simply that the government has not been able to implement an effective strategy to combat the Dutch disease of money flowing into the country. The avalanche of petrodollars has led to a bubble in the real estate and share markets Flats are being bought by investors and prices are being driven up. The monopoly of the civil service mafia in the construction and land markets prevent new investors from entering it, slows construction, and artificially drives prices in an upward spiral. The lack of clear rules for the allocation of building plots and the fact that this area is dominated by municipal mafia clans acts as an important restraining factor in the house-building industry. Even though the rate of new housing construction has, according to Rosstat data, reached 10-14% per year, this is in fact a very modest result: were the housing market more open, decriminalised, and competitive, the rate of new housing construction could have reached 25-30%.

Another area in which monopolies dominate is that of building materials production, in particular of cement. The monopolisation of the building materials market has led to a price explosion: Rosstat figures show that the price of cement rose by 35% a year between 2003 and 2007 and in 2007 alone by 67%. This situation is yet another result of the government’s lack of any competition policies.

The situation in public housing is particularly bad. The reform of public housing management failed: competition was to have been introduced but instead became another civil service mafia monopoly. As a result, utilities and services prices continue to rise and no improvements have been made to tired and worn-out buildings, not to mention services. Between 2000 and 2007, utilities and services prices were raised by a total of 850%, over 33% per year. The proportion of their income spent by those who live in public housing has risen from 4.6% in 2000 to nearly 9% (Rosstat’s figures).

The “Education” national project

Education reform has consisted of a series of failures. The introduction of the Single State Exam needed to eradicate corruption in the form of “supplementary private tuition” when applying to enter prestigious institutions of higher education has been to all intents and purposes a failure. Corruption in higher education is flourishing: the average bribe to get into into a Moscow college is now anywhere between $5 and $10 thousand. UNESCO has estimated that the total amount paid in bribes for entry into Russian higher education exceeds $500 million per year. Our colleges and universities have still not managed to find an effective system for producing the specialists needed by the labour market to replace the old Soviet system whereby one was assigned to a job on graduation. Graduates are now frequently unable to find employment.

Education policy has all these years devoted too much attention to the problems of higher education while the troubles of pre-school, primary, and secondary education have been all but forgotten. Our kindergartens are nothing to boast about either: there is a shortage of about 1 million kindergarten places. This leads to corruption: the bribe for a place in a municipal kindergarten in, say, Moscow, can reach several thousand dollars! The quality of school education has dropped sharply. Recent specialist studies have concluded that the real average mark of school leavers in such subjects as Russian language, maths, and history should not be more than a mere “Pass” and certainly not “Good” or “Excellent”. Secondary polytechnic education is in a state of near total prostration.

The “Agro-Industrial” national project

Not much was allocated to the development of the agro-industrial complex, just $1 billion per year, and most of this has been frittered away in subsidising credit interest for agricultural producers.

This particular measure was a good one, but only needed the once. It would have been far better for the government to devote its efforts to improving the infrastructure in the countryside, building roads and improving energy supplies (and not at Gazprom’s usurious prices – rural consumers are forced to pay 100-200 thousand rubles to have gas pipes run to them – but for an affordable price). Monopolism needs to be combated and a competitive market for agricultural produce created. There should be support for developing exports. Our agrarian sector, including processing, should be made attractive to foreign investors. Access to finance should be made easier for agricultural producers by means of a special infrastructure for farm credits. Help should be available for leasing equipment and for going over to more modern means of agricultural production.

The vital task of creating a competitive environment for the sale of agricultural produce has not even been broached. As a result small-scale producers and farmers cannot influence prices paid to them and do not have proper information on the market situation: big traders and agroproduce processors have a buyers’ monopoly and are able to trade unfairly.

Because the agro-industrial complex has been accorded no systematic attention, the growth rates for Russia’s agriculture are the lowest in the CIS at just 2%. Forty-five percent of Russia’s food is imported although even as recently as 2004 the volume of imports stood at 20%. The situation is still worse in larger cities where up to 70% of foodstuff is imported.

Putin’s “national projects” have resulted in no miracles

A sad fate awaits the “national projects” once the oil money has all gone. What Russia really needed instead of “national projects” was to concentrate on real social reforms, to start spending money on public health, education, the army, and the infrastructure – instead of on the special services and Abramovich. And instead of producing some weird “successor” out of a hat – to elect as leaders responsible politicians unsullied by corruption, ready to take action against the monopolies, and prepared to carry out properly thought out policies instead of indulging in slapdash monetary handouts.

In a January 2001 lecture at Harvard University's Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Russian political activist Lev Ponomarev, head of the For Human Rights movement and member of the executive committee of the Other Russia opposition movement, said:

We believe that what happens in Chechnya, and what is happening is Chechnya is very alarming. We discussed the term "genocide" during our congress. It is a legal term, and we were very concerned about not abusing this term. But we used different formulations, for example, the "first signs of genocide," or the "beginning of genocide," or the "symptoms of genocide." But in the face of hundreds of thousands of people being killed, people dying in Chechnya, we believe that the West needs to apply more pressure on Russia. By being complacent, by playing along with Putin, the West betrays Russia's true interests. Our position is such that we are not against using force in Chechnya. Moreover, having troops there is a very good way to begin negotiations— from a position of power. We do believe that it is necessary to fight against the bandits. We believe that right now is the best time to start negotiating with Chechen leaders, while the troops are in Chechnya.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had taken the dramatic action of suspending Russia's voting rights in the summer of 2000 as Vladimir Putin's bloodletting in Chechnya rose to truly barbaric levels, but just a few months later it backed down. Ponomarev decried this craven weakness as a "betrayal" of the Russian human rights movement, which was risking all to take a stand against the Kremlin's conduct only to have the rug pulled out from under them by Europe. He called on the West to renew its commitment to human rights in Russia.

The West didn't listen to Ponomarev in January 2001, nor did the Kremlin. Instead, six months later U.S. president George Bush met with Putin at a castle in Slovenia and declared afterwards: "I looked the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul, a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy." Unfortunately, neither President Bush nor any other prominent Western leader spent much time looking Mr. Ponomarev in the eye. Putin then radically escalated the mayhem in Chechnya, adopting a scorched-earth policy that rejected any notion of human rights in the region.

The result? Ponomarev told the Jamestown Foundation last week: "If human rights activists were earlier calling for fair trials and independent courts, today we are saying, just like in the Soviet period, 'Free the political prisoners!' If there were dozens of political prisoners during the Soviet period and there were none during the Gorbachev/Yeltsin period, at least the earlier part, then now there exists entire categories, no longer just separate individuals." So over the course of Putin's two terms as "president" we went from massive human rights atrocities in Chechnya to the resurrection of the Gulag Archipelago in Russia proper while the West stood idly by and did nothing, just as it did when Stalin committed his escalating series of atrocities. Ponomarev now says that "Russia may be able to rebuild and acquire some real political clout in 10 or 15 years." He says that a window of opportunity remains open, though, because of the extremely "brazen" nature of the Kremlin's power grab and its desire to maintain a democratic facade for Western consumption. This means activists like him have a slender lever they can use to pressure the regime if they receive sufficient support for their efforts.

In a translation on Robert Amsterdam's blog, Ponomarev describes the horror of the Russian prison, where an asthmatic arrested for theft and awaiting trial receives capital punishment by being denied his inhaler and another man, also awaiting trial and convicted of nothing, receives emergency surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer only because of a massive uprising by his cellmates. He points out that while the European Court for Human Rights has been repeatedly willing to issue judgments against Russia for violation of international norms, it has imposed only paltry monetary compensation figures even in the event of fatalities (a mere 20,000 euros in one instance, hardly likely to fill the Kremlin with dread). He states morosely: "It remains simpler for medical personnel from the FSIN to certify the death of a person than to treat him. Judges appear to consider themselves (ah, but how sincerely?) not to be accessories to these sufferings and deaths. Their motto is "you shouldn’t have committed the crime, then you wouldn’t have ended up in the jail' seems to confirm that the principle of presumption of innocence has nothing whatsoever to do with our judiciary system."

The St. Petersburg Times reported last week that when three Other Russia opposition activists were arrested at a protest rally against the closing of a market last weekend, they were thrown into a truck with another man, Dmitry Smekalov, who had already been brutally beaten by the arresting officers. The SPT states:

His face was so heavily beaten; he was bleeding, he had a swollen nose and lips and I didn’t recognize him, even though I’d seen him several times before. And then, when we were inside, they continued to beat him for another ten minutes. “I thought that they were either high or drunk, because it was totally unmotivated cruelty toward an absolutely defenseless man who didn’t offer any resistance. He only asked, ‘Why are you beating me?’ “[They replied,] ‘We ain’t beating you - we haven’t started yet.’ It was like a pack of dogs attacking an unfamiliar, ailing dog. They were beating him, six of them, for 10 minutes in the presence of a deputy of the Legislative Assembly. With fists, feet, truncheons, whatever.”

Yet, when the group was transported to the police station, the beaten man wasn't processed "since he was not among the rally’s organizers and had just happened to be walking near the location." When the police discovered their mistake, rather than apologizing they called in OMON stormtroopers to intimidate the victim:

"In the evening I learnt that [the OMON police] were on their way to their base when they stopped by the Neva and, as [Smekalov] told me, dragged him by his arms and legs, swung him and threw him over the parapet into the Neva. He told me, ‘I was flying and thinking, “I hope there will be no water down there because I’ll in such a condition that I’m not able to swim.”’ But it turned out there was ice."

The activists themselves were also beaten after being taken into custody.

It's rather ironic that the politician we in America most often hear talking about standing up to Russia is Republican John McCain. The right is hardly the party associated most closely in the public mind with the protection of civil rights and liberties, and yet we hear a deafening silence from the likes of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Do these so-called "Democrats" really believe in the creed they purport to espouse, or are they only blowing smoke to collect the support of those voters who do?

Confronting Russia ought to be something, as it was during the first cold war, that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. They ought to be fighting over which one has the more effective battle plan, but instead the Democrats are sticking their heads in the sand, betraying their ideals, and behaving just like their despised nemesis George Bush did when Putin first came to power. It's an irony of almost unbelievable proportions, and ought to make any American voter think twice about giving either Clinton or Obama their support.

It's very clear who Russian human rights activists would choose. But will we listen to Lev this time? We report below that the Kremlin, having apparently not faced sufficient resistance the first time it tried the move, has now illegally inducted a second youth opposition leader into the armed forces. If it is not stopped, there will be a third, and soon every single youth activist will have been victimized.

Then the Kremlin will turn its gaze to us.

It's already focusing its evil eye upon Lev himself. Robert Amsterdam reported over the weekend that the Kremlin has launched a criminal investigation against the activist which may be related to Ponomarev's providing data and video about prison mistreatment which was picked up and reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The pattern than began with Galina Starovoitova has now led to Ponomarev's doorstep. Soon, if concerted action isn't taken by the West, there will be nobody left in Russia to speak for civilization.

We report below that Ponomarev's video material exposing the outrages of the Russian penal system and published by Robert Amsterdam is now back online after being cited by the Wall Street Journal and then, apparently, victimized by some sort of Kremlin brigadniki action to censor it. Required viewing. Truly, one video is worth a hundred thousand screams.

Other Russia reports:

A legal case for alleged draft dodging has been mounted against an opposition activist in the Russian city of Kirov. As the Sobkor@ru news agency reported on February 19th, the target of the case is Denis Shadrin, a leader of the local branch of the United Civil Front party.

On Tuesday, Shadrin’s mother received a call from the local prosecutor’s office, and was instructed to appear as a witness for a hearing involving a criminal case initiated against her son. The lead prosecutor told her that the case was being mounted after Shadrin refused to accept an enlistment notice on several occasions.

Shadrin recounted a different story, explaining that he had not been visited by any officers from the military enlistment office, and could not have refused a summons. In his opinion, the staff of the Leninsky district enlistment office were using threats to coerce people into serving as witnesses and signing off that others had renounced their enlistment notices.

Furthermore, Shadrin explained that he was not fit for military service for health reasons, as he suffers from scoliosis. Corresponding documents were recently forwarded to the enlistment office.

Denis Shadrin has been targeted by his Kirov prosecutors before. In 2007, a different criminal case charged the activist with “forcible assertion of right”. Consequently, a misdemeanor charge was launched. On February 1st, 2008, the case was suspended for lack of evidence by a magistrate of the Kirovsky oblast judicial district.

Shadrin’s prosecution adds to joins a growing number of instances where opposition activists are illegally threatened or conscripted into military service. February 20th marked two months since Oleg Kozlovsky, a leader in the vocally anti-Putin Oborona (Defense) youth movement was taken by plain-clothes officers outside of his home and sent to serve in the army. Kozlovsky, 23, was first moved to a district enlistment office, then to an army assembly point, and finally shipped to military base number 11291 in the Moscow oblast. Two days later, he was moved again, this time to an air base in the Ryazan oblast. After his case was put before military prosecutors, he was able to file a request for a required medical examination. He was then taken to a garrison clinic, where he was deemed “fit with restrictions” for military service.

Oleg Kozlovsky had completed training courses for the Russian reserves as a student in Moscow State University, and was legally exempt from serving. Nonetheless, he was enlisted as a common soldier and must now serve for one year. Other members of Oborona, as well as notable politicians and human rights activists believe that Kozlovsky was conscripted in retaliation for his opposition activities.

Writing in the New Statesman Tom Porteous, director of Human Rights Watch's London office, condemns Vladimir Putin's shameless, cowardly war on NGOs. If Putin is so popular and Russia is so strong, why does he fear these small shoestring organizations so much?

“An election is more than what happens on election day,” goes the expression - and it seems particularly apposite to Russia in the lead up to the presidential elections on 2 March. In the past eight years the government of president Vladimir Putin has weakened, almost beyond recognition, most of the essential elements that underpin a healthy democracy.

All Russia's major democratic institutions remain in place, but they have been largely emptied of real capacity to serve as a check on the Kremlin's power. The news media have been neutered: independent TV and radio have been all but destroyed and the independent press severely curtailed. The parliamentary opposition in the Duma has been marginalized. Direct election of regional governors has been abolished. The independence of the judiciary has, through various means, been seriously compromised.

All this has been prominently reported in the international media. Less well known is the extent to which the Kremlin has deliberately gone about stifling another essential pillar of a vibrant and successful democracy: independent nongovernmental organisations.

In a report published this week, Human Rights Watch documents how Putin’s government has in recent years sharply turned the screw on Russia’s vibrant civil society that emerged from the glasnost era. The report, Choking on Bureaucracy, tells the depressing but familiar story of an authoritarian government using a combination of red tape and arbitrary intimidation to curtail the efforts of grassroots social activists to build a better society.

The main tool has been a 2006 law that gives the government agencies broad authority to regulate the activities of non-governmental organizations. It has used this law – and other measures such as the amended 2002 “anti-extremism law” – to silence or effectively paralyze critical voices. Particular targets of the Kremlin are those NGOs which work on controversial issues such as human rights, those working in sensitive regions such as the North Caucasus, those that receive foreign funding, and those which seek to galvanize legitimate public dissent.

The 2006 law grants state officials wide powers to interfere in the setting up and operations of all NGOs. The authorities can reject applications for registration on the pettiest of grounds. The law imposes onerous reporting requirements and allows officials to conduct regular and intrusive inspections, which have been used to harass NGOs. Both can tie down an organisation in weeks or months of paperwork.

In its attack on civil society, the government has not needed to resort to such blunt tactics as mass closings of NGOs or overt censorship. More subtly, though just as effectively and chillingly, it has drowned them in paperwork and bureaucracy, while maintaining veneer of legality. NGOs are free to challenge the warnings and directives which result from inspections, but only at a huge cost to their substantive work.

One example: throughout much of 2007 the Information Center of the NGO Council, a group that provides daily bulletins on the situation in Chechnya and Ingushetia, was threatened with dissolution by the tax service for being improperly registered and failing to pay back taxes. The organization is challenging a fine for the equivalent of US$ 20,000 imposed by the tax service.

The Kremlin has justified the NGO law on the grounds that it must monitor foreign funding of Russian NGOs. This is something the Kremlin has regarded with great suspicion since the so called ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia when public uprisings peacefully overturned pro-Moscow governments. Moscow believes those uprisings were spearheaded by foreign funded NGOs.

The Russian government, like any other, has the right to regulate NGOs. But it also has a duty to ensure that any restrictions on NGOs are compatible with Russia’s obligations under international human rights laws that protect freedom of expression and association.

As the Human Rights Watch’s report demonstrates quite clearly, the 2006 NGO law and other restrictive measures used against NGOs by the Russian authorities are in violation of international human rights standards and hinder the effective exercise of basic civil and political rights.

The 2 March election may be a foregone conclusion. But there is a longer term, and those seeking to salvage Russian democracy should start by challenging the Kremlin’s crackdown on NGOs and speaking up for the rights of Russia’s courageous and vibrant civil society.

This video, posted by Robert Amsterdam on his YouTube page, was cited in a Wall Street Journal article by Bret Stephens and viewed more than 30,000 times. Some sort of action was then taken which led to YouTube removing the video, perhaps initiated by the Kremlin, but Amsterdam has now succeeded in restoring the video the the page.

The Moscow Times reports more evidence of how popular Vladimir Putin is:

The Kremlin didn't need to lift a finger this time.

Governors know that they need the support of the likely next president, Dmitry Medvedev, to keep their jobs, and they are working hard to get out the vote for him on March 2, a senior election official said, "What's the best way to show the next president that you love him? In this election the answer is to guarantee him a good turnout so that Medvedev becomes Russia's legitimate president in everyone's eyes," said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. The official's account was backed up by doctors, professors and businessmen who said they had been ordered to vote and increase turnout. Representatives of several governors' offices flatly denied trying to curry favor with the Kremlin.

Ahead of the State Duma elections in December, the Kremlin and United Russia ordered governors to ensure high turnouts, said the election official and other people familiar with the situation. But this time the initiative appears to have come from the governors themselves. "They didn't wait for orders to come from above," the official said. The president holds the power to appoint and dismiss governors after Putin ditched gubernatorial elections in 2004, ostensibly as a way to strengthen the state. With their future in the Kremlin's hands, governors and their administrations are eager to show Medvedev their loyalty. "Most governors have an agreement with Putin but not with Medvedev. Now they are working hard to build it," the official said.

After the governors started working on turnout, the Kremlin asked them to aim for at least 65 percent, the official said. If turnout is low, election officials are ready to stuff ballot boxes with absentee ballots, the official said. A Kremlin spokesman had no immediate comment Thursday. The Kremlin has denied similar claims about the Duma elections.

The 65 percent target seems attainable after average turnout for the Duma elections reached 63 percent. Recent nationwide surveys, however, indicate that only 54 percent of voters intend to cast their ballots on March 2. In practical terms, that means about 40 percent of voters will actually vote, the election official said. With opposition candidates prevented from running and Medvedev's victory all but a foregone conclusion, the Kremlin faces the specter of low turnout because of voter apathy. High turnout would especially help legitimize the vote after international observers decided to skip the election following Moscow-ordered restrictions that they said would severely hamper their work. To reach 65 percent, regional officials have turned for help to state hospitals, universities and big and medium-size factories.

Large factories have been asked to organize polling stations on their premises and demand that their workers get absentee ballots to vote there, the election official said. This way employers can check whether the workers voted. Some employers have asked workers to show them their absentee ballots, the official said. Employers are following orders in order to avoid trouble with the authorities. The owner of a factory outside Moscow said he had refused to help United Russia in the Duma elections and had subsequently been forced to pay a large fine after surprise tax and fire inspections in January uncovered alleged violations. "Only my connections have helped me keep my business. They told me to keep quiet this time and to do what they [the authorities] want," he said. "I had to ask my workers to go and vote," he said.

A doctor at a large Moscow hospital said she and the hospital's other 2,500 workers had been asked to get absentee ballots to vote at the hospital. The hospital's chief doctor, she said, had told the personnel that "it was important for the hospital to show a good turnout if it wanted to get funds from the state."

Election officials organize polling stations at hospitals on election day to allow patients to vote. Under the law, hospital workers can also vote at the polling stations if they file a simple written request. A dean at a private Moscow university said he had received a letter from a senior Moscow official asking that he attend a meeting "to prepare for the presidential election." About 20 officials from various Moscow universities attended the meeting, he said. "They told us that they had been asked to provide a high turnout. They said that if we performed well, we would be rewarded," he said. The dean said the Moscow official emphasized that the Kremlin was upset that student turnout in the Duma elections had been around 25 percent in the city. University officials were told to demand that their students obtain absentee ballots and vote at university polling stations. The dean said state universities would follow the orders to avoid funding cuts, while private schools wanted to avoid the prospect of being harassed by tax and fire inspectors.

Even low-ranking bureaucrats have an interest in getting out the vote because they are likely to lose their jobs if the Kremlin fires the governor. "New governor, new people. Everyone is working for his own future," the official said. There is also a financial incentive. Moscow district heads and election officials who helped United Russia in the Duma elections received cash bonuses, the official said. Regional administrations denied that governors wanted a high turnout to impress Medvedev. "Our governor was confirmed six months ago. He doesn't need to demonstrate anything to the new president," said Alexei Khastrikin, a spokesman for Bryansk Governor Nikolai Denin. "On our regional television channel you see more of Zhirinovsky and Zyuganov than Medvedev," he added. The three candidates running against Medvedev are Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, Liberal Democratic Party leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky and Andrei Bogdanov, an independent.

Dagestani leader Mukhu Aliyev is not afraid of losing his job over a low turnout, said his spokesman, Abutalib Mamayev. "We had a 91 percent turnout [in the Duma elections]," he said. "People love Putin and love Medvedev, and I'm sure that the turnout will be the same this time."

In Moscow, election officials are prepared to stuff ballot boxes with absentee ballots if turnout does not reach 65 percent, the election official said. In previous elections, the official said, voters were packed into buses and ferried around to polling stations to vote "as many times as needed."

"If I have 30 people, I could take them to 10 polling stations and I have 300 more votes for the city," the official said. The official said Moscow district heads would have a good idea of their turnout figures by 4 p.m. on election day, since most people vote between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m. If the turnout is low, they could then call in the buses. Authorities are also keeping an eye on people likely to vote against Medvedev, the official said. In Moscow, for example, authorities are not encouraging disgruntled residents of apartment buildings whose courtyards are being exploited by city developers to vote. "They know that people like that will vote against Medvedev. Who needs that?" the official said

Based on the Tier I tournament results from Doha, Qatar last week, it would appear that the hour of the Slavs in women's tennis has expired as quickly as it tolled:

World #2 Ana Ivanovic (seed #1) out in second match to non-top-15 Pole

World #3 Svetlana Kuznetsova (seed #2) out in second match to non-top-10 Austrian

World #4 Jelena Jankovic (seed #3) out in third match to non-top-25 Chinese

World #16 Nadia Petrova (seed #10) out in first match to non-top-30 Spaniard

Then again, having a name like "Chakvetadze" or "Safina" wasn't much help either, as the World #6 "Russian" (the #5 seed) Chakvetadze went down in her first match, in straight sets, to the same unseeded Chinese player who took out Jankovic, and the #15 "Russian" (the #11 seed) was crushed in her third match by a non-top-25 Russian.

All this carnage is what was necessary to vault Vera Zvonareva (unseeded, World #27) and Maria Sharapova (seed #4, world #5) into the semifinals to face, respectively, an unseeded opponent and the #16 seed. The world rankings of the three players Sharapova needed to defeat to reach the semis were #126, #101 and and #53 -- in other words, to reach the semi-finals of this Tier I, $2.5 million event Sharapova was not required to face a single player ranked in the world's top 50. When she reached the semis, where she should have had to face either the #1 seed or the dangerous #6 Venus Williams, Shamapova's opponent was actually ranked #20 in the world and only seeded because four higher-ranked players did not show themselves in Qatar. By the time Shamapova reached the semi-finals, she was guaranteed to be able to win the tournament after having faced only one seeded player in the course of five matches, and that one being the lowest seed in the tournament. Both she and Zvonareva were also lucky enough to draw Russian opponents for one of their first three matches, both drew lower-ranked opponents in their semi-finals contents (only one faced a seed), and thus both had a serious shot at facing a Russian for the title.

And in the end, that's just what happened. After reaching the finals without facing a single top-ten seed (and only one seed in total), Shamapova found herself facing an unseeded fellow Russian not ranked in the top 25 in the world for the title. Lo and behold, she prevailed (though it took her three sets to do so)! Another epic display of Russian talent by a player who hasn't lived in Russia since she was a child and learned how to play in the United States.

So Shamapova is back to her old tricks, using dumb luck rather than skill to work her way deep into significant tournaments and collect cheap ratings points. If you examine her career, you'll see this pattern repeated over and over, especially during the period when she briefly held the #1 ranking. Which, of course, is why we call her "Sham"-o-pova. Much like her country, Shampova is a triumph of form over substance, an bubble-like illusion just waiting for another humiliating "pop!"

(1) The Sunday Photo: Oborona Stands Up for Kozlovsky

(2) Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Putin via Essel, Part 4

(3) The Sunday Prayer: Estonia Counts Her Blessings

(4) The Sunday Pogrom

(5) The Sunday Persecution

(6) The Sunday Spy


NOTE: We are honored to publish #3 above, a wonderful essay about Estonia from one of her more prominent and proud citizens. Estonia's story is one of courage and hope that should be a beacon light to those who now dwell behind the new Iron Curtain.

NOTE: Russia's (even more?) barbaric "little brother" Serbia has cravenly attacked the U.S. embassy in Belgrade. We let them have it on Publius Pundit.

On Wednesday February 20th activists from Oborona staged a coordinated series of public acts of civil disobedience to protest the illegal induction of their leader Oleg Kozlovsky into the Russian armed forces for the purpose of intimidating and silencing their civil rights activities. Actions were staged in Vladikavkaz (shown above) as well as Tula, Murmansk, and Pskov. They blocked traffic and spray-painted graffiti and were supported by activists from Other Russia, SPS and Yabloko.

NOTE: This is the fourth part of a serialized translation of Boris Nemtsov's white paper critiquing the Putin years. It includes the fifth and sixth chapters of the work. Part 1 (introduction and chapter one) appeared on Monday, Part 2 (chapter two) on Wednesday, and Part 3 (chapters three and four) appeared on Friday. look for Part 5 on Monday. You can display all the parts in reverse sequence on a single web page by simply clicking the "nemtsov white paper" link at the bottom of this post.

Putin: the Bottom Line

by Boris Nemtsov

First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, 1997-1998

and

Vladimir Milov

Deputy Minister of Energy, 2002

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Chapter 5

The Pension Crisis

One of the most depressing results of Putin’s presidency is the collapse of the pensions system. A modern pensions system able to cope with the less than simple demographic situation in the country really needed to be created when external events were favourable.

But the pensions reform was a total failure. The government these days only remembers pensioners just before elections by indexing pensions a little. Before the State Duma elections of 2007, Putin as usual gave the government a ticking off and ordered that the princely sum of 300 rubles [$12] be added to pensions before end 2007.

What else the authorities can offer, besides a little indexation, is unclear. The pensions system is going deeper and deeper into deficit. The population is aging and the proportion of workers to pensioners is only going to get worse. As a result, the pension fund is going into ever deeper deficit: the subsidy to cover the Russian Pension Fund’s deficit in 2007 was 88.2 billion rubles. This will rise to 251.4 billion in 2009 (over $10 billion). According to Mr. Batanov,who heads the RPF, up to 1 trillion rubles will be needed by 2015!

Meanwhile, pensions are laughably small, amounting on average today across Russia to less than 4000 rubles [$162] per month. Over the period the Putin-Zurabov pension scheme has been in operation, the ratio between average pension and average salary has decreased from 33% in 2000 to 24% today. By 2018, the average pension will amount to just 20% of the average salary , and by 2027 this will go down to 15-18%. In European countries, pensions amount to 40% and more of average salary.

In a distributory pensions system such as the one we have in Russia, the employed pay contributions to the Pension Fund which then go to pensioners. Such a system can only provide a decent level of pensions if the ratio of employed to pensioners stands at approximately 3:1. Today, this ratio in Russia stands at 1.7:1 and by 2020-2030 demographers believe that it may drop as low as 1:1. Ratios such as these mean that the only way to provide pensioners with a reasonable pension is to have an investment-based pension system. If we continue with the distributive system, pensions will be miserably small.

But the creation of an investment-based pensions system has failed. Payments from it will start no earlier than 2022. At the same time it is likely that a considerable proportion of the invested fund will be lost: the profitability of the invested funds has so far been to all intents and purposes negative. In 2006, the pension fund managed by Vneshekonombank achieved a return of 5.7% while inflation ran at 9% during the same period. Private fund management companies have been achieving returns of 20% per annum but 97% of people did not express a choice and specifically ask for their money to be managed privately and so remain in the default scheme managed by Vneshekonombank.

People simply do not have the information needed to decide how best to have their money managed, do not know anything about how the various management companies work, and cannot make a sensible choice for themselves. Furthermore, it is not always easy, even if one wants to, to transfer one’s money to a private management company. Those who try do so generally have to face opposition in their local Pension Fund office.

If an effective investment-based pension system were to be set up, it would solve other problems as well: capital assets would exist which could be used to invest in projects for the long-term modernisation of the country such as the electricity and power infrastructure and upgrading housing. Competition for investment from the pension fund would lead to more attractive investment offers.

But the reforms went only half way: Vneshekonombank and the Pension Fund were given a monopoly and the civil servants in charge are barely making an effort (by mistake or perhaps deliberately). As a result, the move to an investment-based pensions systems has not been successful.

In February 2007, former minister Zurabov proposed in a letter to the government that the pension reform be cancelled, that the savings-based system be liquidated and the individual savings of citizens be (compulsorily) used to finance the pension fund deficit. As a matter of interest, after his retirement in October 2007, Zurabov was secretly appointed an adviser to president Putin and now has an office on Old Square and receives a salary from the Presidential Administration. Putin must have been afraid to let the public know that he had found a sinecure for the unpopular ex-minister: the ukase appointing Zurabov was not posted on the presidential website.

Russia has thus missed its chance to modernise the pension system during good times and it is steadily moving towards total collapse. The pension fund deficit is growing larger at a time when there is a serious possibility that world oil prices will fall. The investment-based system is out of commission.

There are ways out. It would be possible, as Yegor Gaidar proposes, to follow Norway’s example and create a unitary pensionfund of about a trillion dollars by paying into it the windfall income from a tax on oil exports, from the income on the shares of state-owned companies, and income from large-scale privatisation of state assets. (What the government actually did was mainly to spend billions of dollars buying back assets from Abramovich and other oligarchs.) The Pension Fund should not have to be continually topped up with injections from central funds. Instead a system should be created which actually brings in income itself. If this fund was of, say, a trillion dollars, it would be possible to double the size of pensions even in the fund’s returns were quite moderate.

We need to take more decisive steps towards an investment-based pension system. The Russian pension system cannot be allowed to limp forward to its collapse in 2015-2020. Putin will have gone by that time and it is all of us who will have to rue the consequences.

Chapter 6

The Basman Courts

The Putin era has led people to lose all faith in justice and legal protection and to the collapse of the idea of the supremacy of the law. “We insist on just one dictatorship – the dictatorship of the law,” said Putin in his first speech to the Federal Assembly in 2000.

“Dictatorship of lawlessness” are the words for the situation at the end of his presidency. Russia has become the world champion in selective application of the law to serve the interests of the authorities. Judges are totally subordinated to the executive and wholesale infraction of civil rights is the order of the day in any court case. Russia has earned the dubious rank of first place in the number of applications by its citizens to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Over one fifth all applications to this court emanate from Russia and in over 90% of such cases, the state has lost. Unfortunately, Strasbourg cannot oblige our judges to review their decisions; it can only oblige the state to pay compensation to citizens. Our legal authorities therefore feel quite secure in their positions.

The Yukos affair crowned the victory of lawlessness in Russia: the courts were used as a tool for the removal of private property in favour of Putin’s inner circle. During this affair, Russia developed a type of judicial procedure that has come to be called Basman justice “in honour” of the Basman District Court which heard the case, working wonders of lawlessness and displaying total servility to the executive in rendering its decision against Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and Platon Lebedev.

As soon as Yukos’ assets had changed owners, the judges immediately reviewed their previous rulings that Yukos owed taxes which it had to pay. After Yukos' main asset – Yuganskneftegaz – passed into the control of Rosneft, the tax claims against it evaporated and the judges “miraculously” began to drop tax claims against the company. In February 2005, the Federal Arbitration Court of the Moscow Assize annulled its previous ruling that over 9 billion rubles of back taxes from 1999 were owed by Yuganskneftegaz. Prior to this, while it was still a Yukos subsidiary, Yuganskneftegaz had lost its case twice. In October 2005, the Moscow Arbitration Court ruled that the Federal Tax Service’s claim for extra tax for the period 1999-20001 amounting to 5.6 billion rubles was unlawful .

The Yukos affair untied hands for the start of the “tax terror” – massive arbitrary tax claims against enterprises at the whim of the tax inspectorate. Enterprises were forced to pay to the government not how much they owed in law but how much the authorities thought right. In most cases, the courts sided with the tax authorities. The presumption that the taxpayer has correctly calculated his taxes, which is enshrined in the Tax Law Code, was to all intents and purposes replaced by a presumption of guilt. It became practically impossible to carry on business in Russia without making unlawful payments of tax. Tax terrorism is used ubiquitously as a stick for the removal of property from “outsiders” for redistribution to “insiders”. This happens at all levels – federal, regional, and local.

This system holds back the development of enterprise in the country, its worst effects being felt by small and medium-scale business which cannot afford to pay bribes to civil servants and judges. This is leading the country to the total triumph of monopolism, a monopolistic alliance between criminal business and corrupt civil servants. How the “state racket” operates to snatch property from entrepreneurs and gift it to organisation linked to the civil service was described in an interview with Kommersant in November 2007 by Oleg Shvartzman, an entrepreneur who had himself taken part in some of the Kremlin’s business projects. Putin’s system was actually devised by Shvartzman. Not just Yukos’ assets are feeling the pressure of the state racket system via the administration, the courts. Others include: Sakhalin-2, Russneft, Nortgaz, Tambeineftegaz, the Kovykta gasfield, United Machine-Tool Factories, Domodedovo airport. The list could be continued.

Legal reform supposed to underpin the Constitutional guarantee of the independence of the judiciary has had the very opposite effect. Independence has turned into dependance. Putin re-appointed the majority of Russian judges and in 2000 successfully maneuvered to have presidential appointees included in the Qualification Colleges which are supposed to be organs of oversight and control and have the right to dismiss judges from their posts. The wording of the laws On the Status of Judges in the Russian Federation and On the Organs of Judicial Organisation in the Russian Federation do not provide clear criteria for what “disciplinary offenses” of judges warrant removal from their posts. On the other hand, however, this lack of clarity makes it easy to get rid of judges who make difficulties and to blackmail the remaining ones. One former judge on the Novosibirsk District Court was removed from her post by the Qualification College, for quote “repeated requests to the authorities in defence of her rights and interests”.

It will come as no surprise that judges strive to make rulings that suit the authorities.

The dependence of the courts on the authorities is yet another reason for the lack of protection of Russia’s citizens. Corporate solidarity with the government – of investigators and prosecutors – inclines the courts towards guilty verdicts and in fact, in many cases, judges simply rubber stamp the indictment documents. In one area, however, the inclination towards guilty verdicts is not to be found – in cases to do with the civil servants involved in the redistribution of assets, and others who by dubious means have amassed billions thanks to their links with Putin. People such as these are in a privileged position.

At the other end of the scale, an ordinary Russian can land himself in prison for stealing a piece of sausage. The world was quite shocked in early 2008 by a case which reached the ECHR: Olga Gavrilova of Nizhny Novgorod, a registered invalid and at the time also seriously ill, was kept for several months in pre-trial detention, accused of such a theft.

The legal system needs to be radically changed in order for Russians to get the guaranteed right to judicial protection and to a fair and just examination of their cases. The country needs to implement the principle of the independence of the judiciary enshrined in the Constitution. This will take not just political will on the part of the executive: to achieve this we will also need an independent parliament, public oversight of the authorities, and, as we have several times said already, freedom of the press and of political activities.

In addition to guaranteed independence of the judiciary, we also need clearer legal definitions of the misdemeanours for which the Qualification Colleges have the right to discipline judges and in the case of the most serious offences – above all corruption and indulging the interests of the executive – a legal basis from removing such judges from their posts. When appointing new judges, it will be important to keep in mind the need to form a new judicial generation that has not experienced collaboration with the law enforcement authorities and which is not bound by corporate solidarity with the authorities. This is the only way in which we will be able to get rid of the judiciary's patently open inclination to convict.

Until these conditions are met, there is not much hope of getting unprejudiced justice in Russia.

Small as she is, my home country of Estonia reminds me of those extremely premature babies who beat the odds and survive. While there are other cultures that have been tenacious enough to not disappear despite centuries of foreign domination, with the Welsh being one example, few have hung on by the skin of their teeth for as long as the Estonians. After the Estonian tribes had been vanquished by the Danes and the German Brothers of the Sword in the early 13th century, submission became the rule for hundreds of years, as Estonia was conquered in succession by one European power after another. Performing manual labor on plantations owned by German and Swedish barons, common Estonians eked out a living from one generation to the next.

War and pestilence threatened Estonians with extinction on several occasions. After the Livonian war at the end of the 16th century, their numbers had been reduced to a mere 85,000. An old traveler’s account describes Estonia and Latvia after the passage of the troops of Peter the Great – a landscape strangely devoid of human habitation, where no cock crowed, and no dog barked.
It was not until the Age of Enlightenment and the French Revolution that prospects of better times arrived for the common people of Europe. As time passed, more and more peoples strove to create nations of their own.

Those who Have Known Slavery Savor Freedom Most

Given the choice, all living creatures prefer freedom to fetters. For purposes of illustration, the British military made a major miscalculation in Dublin in 1916, when they executed all seven signatories of the Irish declaration of independence. To this day, the General Post Office in Dublin where the proclamation was made public and the rising began holds a special place in the hearts of the Irish. The Easter Proclamation itself has the status of a revered national icon. The American public regards Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where 56 persons signed the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, as a shrine.

When Estonia declared her independence 90 years ago, it was under risky conditions. Profoundly affected by the Russian Revolution, the Russian garrison in Estonia was plunged into chaos, and retreated to Mother Russia once German troops landed on the Estonian coast. Taking advantage of the temporary power vacuum that ensued, the Estonian Diet took a “now or never” decision. It was on the stairs of the Endla Theater in the coastal city of Parnu that Estonian independence was proclaimed on February 23, 1918.

Estonians had been kept from occupying positions of prominence and power in their own country for a long time. Georg Hellat, who drew up the construction plans for the theater, was the first significant architect of native Estonian background to make good. The Endla theater - a Jugendstil building designed by him – was dedicated in 1911. During the independence period between the two World Wars, it would serve in free Estonia as a hub of local culture for Parnu, a resort city of tree-lined streets and hotels and spas that is famous thanks largely to its beaches.

It was quite remarkable that Estonia, supported by British naval guns, succeeded in expelling both German and Soviet Russian armies during a war of independence that went on for over a year. In the Tartu Peace Treaty of 1920 between The Russian Soviet Republic and the Republic of Estonia, the Kremlin relinquished all rights to the territory of Estonia for time eternal. Instead of remaining free forever, the three Baltic States – Estonia included – actually only experienced independence for twenty years.

When Western Europe was set free at the end of World War II, these three parliamentary democracies – they had been members of the League of Nations – had been “abducted” by the occupying Red Army and annexed to the USSR – a step never recognized by a great many Western democracies. No longer would Baltic teams compete at the Olympic Games under their own flags. Three members of the European community, hijacked by the USSR, simply went missing for half a century. Although Estonia and her two neighbors to the south – Latvia and Lithuania – are often referred to nowadays as former Soviet Republics, they were not in fact secessionist parts of Russia that broke away from Moscow in 1991, but ought to be seen instead as “submerged nations”, whose occupation finally came to an end as Boris Yeltsin took his seat in the Kremlin.

Nobody can Hear us

When I think of Estonia and her forcible incorporation into the USSR by the Soviet Union, I am often reminded of Kitty Genovese, the New York City woman who, in 1964, was stabbed to death near her home in the Kew Gardens section of Queens. The Genovese case became know for the psychological phenomenon called the “bystander effect”, in which violence is perpetrated on someone within hearing of neighbors, but the cries are not noticed. Estonian President Konstantin Pats was forcibly taken away in 1940 by the secret police of the Soviet Union, and was held incommunicado in insane asylums until his death in Tver, Russia in 1956. Pats is shown below, before and after his persecution.



The fate of the Endla Theater – the birthplace of Estonian independence – was not any prettier.


The golden era of Estonian independence had also been the heyday of the Endla, where up to 600 persons at a time gathered to enjoy performances of plays and operas by Ibsen, Shakespeare, Strauss, Verdi and many others. When Hitler’s occupying army retreated and the Red Army reentered the country in 1944, staging a supposed “liberation” of Estonia, Parnu was caught between the fighting sides. 1944 was a bad year for Estonia in general. Bombs dropped by the Soviet Air Force totally gutted the baroque pearl that had been the city of Narva, and in the capital of Tallinn, 3,000 buildings were destroyed in one night, in a firestorm with heavy loss of lives that can only be described as a version of Dresden in miniature. In her memoirs, local resident Elsbet Parek described the situation in Parnu: “Down below, the Germans torched and destroyed, while the Russians bombed from above.”

Despite the combat and the flames that did considerable harm to Parnu in the fall of 1944, the walls of the Endla Theater remained standing, and there is no doubt that the building could have been salvaged, had there been the will to do so. Only the roof of the building had burned during the war, but the supporting structures were of sturdy masonry and still serviceable, as contemporaries have written. A close acquaintance of mine who grew up in Parnu after the war once recounted that when he was a child in the fifties, it was common for drunks to use the ruins of the Endla theater as a public bathroom. In September, 1951, the Parnu city government proposed that the theater be restored, but the Soviet authorities replied that there was no way that the style of the theater could be made to harmonize with the requirements posed by “contemporary (Stalinist) architectural expectations”.


After the war, the workers of the theater were relocated to another building. In an article that appeared in the Estonian SL Ohtuleht newspaper on May 4, 2006, Olaf Esna, the Director of the Parnu theater during the post-war years, states that the real issue for the Soviet authorities was that the “...veranda of the Endla Theater was the place that the Estonian Declaration of Independence had first been made public...” on February 23, 1918.

The Final Torment of the Endla Theater

The Soviet occupation regime felt it couldn’t afford to allow this reminder of Estonian independence to remain. On March 6, 1961 at 2:30 pm in front of a crowd of people, demolition charges were set off. A dull thud was heard. The walls of the Endla quivered for a moment as if in doubt, but then collapsed to the ground. Several nearby windows were shattered, and for a while, the center of Parnu was enveloped in a cloud of smoke and dust. Later, a box-shaped Soviet style hotel was built on the same location. When I worked in Germany in the eighties, before Estonia regained her independence, one of my colleagues – a person from one of the Western European countries who knew that I am Estonian – brought a copy of a men’s girly magazine from his country to work, and showed me an article with photos that had been surreptitiously been taken in this very Parnu hotel and smuggled out of occupied Estonia. Intended as men’s guide to the underground bordellos of Estonia, the story featured a number of photos of prostitutes engaged in what it is that prostitutes do.

Every country in the world that has attained sovereignty in the face of adversity has its own saga in connection with the struggle for independence, but few have a tale to tell as rich with ironic symbolism as the story of the Endla Theater.

Estonia is Back Again

Lack of freedom and poor health are similar phenomena. Young people, with the exception of sick kids, generally don’t regard heath as a very important topic, much as pensions are a topic they tend to avoid. You only hear old folks saying that “you don’t appreciate being in good health until you develop ailments”. Freedom is a lot like that too. The American people, even in their wildest dreams, could probably never imagine Independence Hall in Philadelphia – jealously and proudly guarded by Park Police – in ruins, being used as a public toilet or a house of prostitution. The point being that occupation powers can do incredible harm to the well-being, dignity, and even the very physical appearance of the territories of cultures that have been vanquished.

Soon, ceremonies will take place in the city of Parnu on the Baltic Sea in Estonia at the place where the Endla Theater – the birthplace of Estonian independence – was blown up by a hostile power in 1961. 90 years ago on February 23, Estonians proclaimed to the world in Parnu their desire to be free. Although actual memories of the Endla Theater now live on only in the elderly, Estonians of all ages give thanks that the only soldiers they will see in Parnu on Independence Day, other than the ones accompanying invited dignitaries, are their own. The message to everyone in the world who enjoys freedom is that one really does need to remember to give thanks in a conscious manner for liberty - something that can all too easily be replaced by a life in the absence of freedom.

Take it from the Estonians, we know what we’re talking about.

Jüri Estam is a communications consultant who lives in Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. He was a member of the Congress of Estonia, one of the predecessors to the current Parliament of Estonia. Prior to that, he covered human rights and other topics for the Estonian Language Service of Radio Free Europe while based in Munich and Scandinavia. Among other things, he has hosted a live prime time current affairs program on Estonian National Television, been the Managing Director of the largest chain of commercial radio stations in the country, and produced a dozen documentary films.

The Moscow Times reports:

Two men, one Kyrgyz and the other Azeri, were stabbed to death Tuesday, bringing the number of fatal attacks on dark-skinned people in the city in the past week to six. The men were killed by unidentified assailants in separate attacks in the south and northeast of the city, an unidentified police official told Itar-Tass news agency, Gazeta.ru reported Wednesday. The Kyrgyz national, whose name wasn't disclosed, was found near 24 Simferopolsky Bulvar in southern Moscow with multiple stab wounds to the back, head and neck. The victim worked as a merchandiser for the Pyatyorochka grocery chain, Gazeta.ru reported. The Azeri man, who wasn't identified, was attacked on Baikalskaya Ulitsa in the city's northeast and also died of multiple stab wounds, the web site said. City police spokeswoman Alevtina Belousova could not immediately comment on the reports when contacted Wednesday. Calls to police later in the day went unanswered. No one could be reached for comment at either the Kyrgyz or Azeri embassies Wednesday afternoon.

Twenty-three people have been killed and more than 50 injured in hate crimes nationwide since the beginning of the year, with 14 of the murders occurring in Moscow, according to statistics from the Sova Center. A total of 67 people were killed and more than 550 injured nationwide in ethnically motivated crimes last year.

It then editorializes:

Six dark-skinned people have been stabbed to death in Moscow in less than a week. In each case, the victims were male and targeted by young people who did not rob them -- attacks that bear the hallmarks of skinhead violence.Yet to hear Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin assess the situation, the killings are random acts of violence. "There is no organized skinhead movement," he said in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda published Monday. This is the official position of the police chief of an ethnically diverse city that has seen 16 racially motivated murders since Jan. 1 -- half of all racist killings nationwide.

Pronin's attitude is alarming. Some experts say the police are reluctant to charge suspects with racial hatred because it is more difficult to get a conviction for these cases than for other crimes. This is difficult to believe, however, since prosecutors, not police, have to prosecute in court, and more than 99 percent of trials result in convictions.

Other experts say some police officers are closet ultranationalists or so opposed to migrants that they hope the attacks will deter potential migrants and force those living here to leave. But many victims are natives of Russia's North Caucasus, and the authorities must be aware of the backlash that the attacks could cause in the turbulent region. A third theory is that police are in denial because an admission about the existence of organized, violent xenophobia would tarnish Russia's image. This is disingenuous, given the bad reputation that the notoriously corrupt police force has already given the country.

What prompted Pronin to deny the possibility of organized skinhead attacks is unclear, but his position is unsurprising. Two years ago, he declared that there were no skinheads in Moscow. "I have never acknowledged them and do not acknowledge them," he said in February 2005. Since this statement, Moscow has witnessed dozens of racist attacks by ultranationalists, including well-organized ones like the bombing of the Cherkizovsky market and simultaneous attacks on dark-skinned people in various parts of the city. It is these attacks, perhaps, that forced Pronin to concede to Komsomolskaya Pravda that skinheads do exist in the city. But he still insisted that they consisted of separate, unorganized groups.

If it took two years for Pronin to acknowledge the existence of skinheads, how long will it take for him to admit that they and other violent ultranationalists might be organized and dangerous? If the police remain entrenched in denial, sooner or later Moscow will face the threat of race riots like those that erupted in Paris in 2006 or even pogroms. Pronin would then face dismissal and possible prosecution for negligence, like the police officers who allowed ethnic riots in Kondopoga in 2006.

If Pronin does not care about the plight of dark-skinned people living in Moscow, he should at least be worried about his own future.

The Moscow Times reports:

A Perm journalist has been questioned by local prosecutors and may face criminal charges after he penned an article identifying what he characterized as positive similarities between President Vladimir Putin and Adolf Hitler.

Igor Averkiyev, 47, editor of the newspaper Lichnoye Delo, was summoned to the city's Leninsky District Prosecutor's Office on Monday to answer questions about an article called "Putin Is Our Good Hitler," published in the newspaper Za Cheloveka in December.

The story compares the eight years of Putin's rule to the early years of Hitler's rule in Nazi Germany.

Prosecutors opened an investigation after receiving a complaint from the Federal Service for Mass Media, Telecommunications and the Protection of Cultural Heritage. The service charged that the story contravened laws in place to battle extremism and demanded that Averkiyev and Sergei Isayev, the publisher of Za Cheloveka, be charged.

The Perm office of the federal body responsible for monitoring compliance with mass media legislation said it found evidence of calls "to change the present constitutional order" in the story.

Perm Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman Tatyana Shuvayeva said Averkiyev had only been called in for preliminary questioning and declined to answer any questions about the case until experts had more opportunity to examine the article.

Averkiyev wrote that "like Hitler, Putin is the savior of the Fatherland, the guardian of greatness, stability and order," who also "safeguards the country from enemies, both foreign and domestic."

During the campaign leading up to December's State Duma elections, Averkiyev claimed, Putin "tried on the mantle of 'national leader,' thus practically making a claim to absolute power in Russia, unlimited by elections, parliaments or constitutions -- limited only by the leader's personal ambition and the people's for him."

Reached by telephone Wednesday, Averkiyev had no immediate comment on the case.

Averkiyev is not the first journalist to face prosecution for what were considered insulting portrayals of Putin.

Charges of inciting extremism by Saratov authorities against Sergei Mikhailov, whose newspaper, The Saratov Reporter, published a photo portraying Putin as popular fictional spy Otto von Stirlitz, were only dropped last week.

Ivanovo journalist Vladimir Rakhmankov was convicted in October of publicly insulting a public official and fined 20,000 rubles ($750) for referring to Putin as "a phallic symbol."

Other Russia reports:

A leading activist of the opposition United Civil Front (OGF) party has revealed that he is employed by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB). Alexander Novikov, who is currently in Denmark, told Novaya Gazeta that he “was tired of living a double life and setting up my friends.” He is seeking political asylum abroad.

Novikov explained how he first penetrated the OGF, the political party led by Garry Kasparov that has been outspoken in its criticism of the Putin administration. The FSB concocted a cover story that Novikov was planning to form an independent union of health workers. According to Novikov, he signed a contract with the agency whereby he was paid eight thousand rubles (€221 or $325) per month for collecting information on the party. Novikov’s handlers were primarily interested in the relationships between members of the movement, and wanted to know who was closest to the leadership. Allegedly, the information Novikov divulged prevented Garry Kasparov from registering as a presidential candidate. By Russian law, at least 500 supporters must gather to jump-start a presidential campaign, and an appropriate venue is required. Yet the first conference room Kasparov had rented refused to host his “initiative group,” and the OGF scrambled to find another space to announce Kasparov’s candidacy.

Novikov said he reported each location that the OGF was considering to his supervisors. In the end, Kasparov could not find a space willing to host his meeting, and subsequently dropped his presidential bid. Meanwhile, Russian law forbids planting agents into organizations that are not banned on Russian territory. According to the law on “Operational Investigation Activity” of 1995, this includes political parties, civil and religious groups, and other organizations that are officially registered.

Roman Dobrokhotov, the leader of the “We” movement, told the Sobkor@ru news agency that he could not remember one political action that Novikov did not participate in. He added that it seemed strange that an FSB agent would “shine” so much at the events. Still, Dobrokhotov noted that Novikov’s announcement comes as little surprise, and he is convinced that there are other undercover intelligence officers among Russia’s opposition groups. In Dobrokhotov’s opinion, Novikov likely confessed to his role in the FSB after he began genuinely sympathizing with the opposition.

The Moscow Times adds:

A former opposition activist who claims that he was recruited by the Federal Security Service to infiltrate former chess champion Garry Kasparov's political movement said Thursday that he had applied for political asylum in Britain. Alexander Novikov, who said he was paid 8,000 rubles per month over a period of two years to give the FSB regular reports on Kasparov's organization, the United Civil Front, said he had applied for asylum at the British Embassy in Copenhagen.

In a telephone interview from Denmark, Novikov, 36, said his FSB handlers wanted to know about "any step, any move, any protest" by Kasparov's group. "They were interested in everything, down to the finest detail," Novikov said. Novikov's story supports claims by opposition activists that the FSB sends spies into their ranks, despite a 1995 law that forbids law enforcers from covertly joining registered political organizations with the goal of influencing their activities. "I have suspected several people of being agents," said Lolita Tsariya, who heads the Moscow branch of the United Civil Front. She confirmed that Novikov had participated in the United Civil Front's meetings and protests. Novikov said he was "ashamed" of his behavior and had gone to the West so he could be free to tell his story. An interview he gave to Danish television this week included a public apology to Kasparov.

Reached by telephone Thursday, Kasparov said he was aware of Novikov's story but too busy to comment. An FSB spokesman declined to comment immediately Thursday and asked for a written inquiry. A faxed request for comment was not answered in time for publication. Repeated phone calls to the Moscow branch of the FSB went unanswered Thursday. A spokesman for the British Embassy in Copenhagen declined to comment for this report.

Andrei Soldatov, an independent expert on the Russian security services who met Novikov in Denmark and wrote an article published Thursday in Novaya Gazeta, said he was convinced that Novikov had collaborated with the FSB. "There were simply very many small details that seemed right -- what side of the street people walked on, how they set up the meetings and so on," said Soldatov, who edits the web site Agentura.ru. Novikov said his career as a snitch began about two years ago, after he went to an FSB office to inquire about an acquaintance whom he had not seen for a long time. Two weeks later, the FSB called him back and offered "an interesting job," Novikov said. That job was spying on the United Civil Front. Soldatov said he did not believe the story of Novikov's recruitment but that details about Novikov's contacts with his FSB handlers were credible.

Novikov met regularly with his handlers in cafes and cars, providing them with written reports about Kasparov's organization, said Novikov, adding that his FSB codename was "Mikhail." Initially his handler was a man named Alexei Vladimirovich, and then it was a younger man named Alexei Lvovich, he said. While being filmed by Danish television this week, Novikov called Alexei Lvovich on his mobile phone. The two discussed payment issues, and Novikov told his handler that he might be appointed to a committee within the United Civil Front, according to a transcript of the conversation published by Novaya Gazeta. Novikov said he participated regularly in Dissenters' Marches and other protests. Last November, he was detained during a protest outside Moscow police headquarters on Ulitsa Petrovka in support of Kasparov, who was in jail at the time.

Gradually, Novikov began to sympathize with the opposition activists he was spying on, which sparked arguments with his FSB handlers, who called the activists "sick people" and "idiots," he said. "I told them, 'If these people are sick, why do you beat them? Why do you attack them with clubs?'" Novikov recalled. Novikov claimed that Tsariya, his fellow activist, had recently offered him a position as head of the northwestern Moscow branch of the United Civil Front. He also claimed that in December he spoiled Kasparov's plans to run for president by telling the FSB which venue would host the required meeting of 500 supporters who would nominate Kasparov as a candidate. After his supporters failed to find a venue that could host the meeting, Kasparov abandoned his presidential plans. Tsariya, however, questioned those two claims. She denied that she had offered him any leadership position in the organization, stressing that it was an elected position, not an appointed one. "He had no chances of becoming a leader because he did not have much authority within the organization," Tsariya said.

Novikov could not have told the FSB where Kasparov's supporters were planning to meet because he did not have access to that information, she added. When told about Tsariya's charges, Novikov conceded that he was not necessarily the person who derailed Kasparov's presidential plans because there were probably others working for the FSB as well. "I suspect there were other people besides me," he said. Both Tsariya and Soldatov speculated that Novikov's real motive in airing his story was to immigrate to the West, possibly for economic reasons. Soldatov said he might be omitting some parts in order to improve his image. "One can think of many possible reasons why he wants to go to the West," Soldatov said. "It is possible he is taking advantage of his situation in order to stay there. But is that enough reason to dismiss his story as total rubbish? I do not think so."

(1) Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Putin by Essel, Part 3

(2) EDITORIAL: Apres Moi, Le Medvedev

(3) Stephens Leads the Way on the New Cold War

(4) Russians: Can't they do ANYTHING on Their Own?

(5) Calling Putin's Bluff in Abkhazia

(6) Russia's Blogosphere, Tilting at Windmills

(7) Craven Putin Draws down the Iron Curtain

(8) How Pathetic is This: Russia Can't Make Jets Good Enough for Algeria

NOTE: This is the third part of a serialized translation of Boris Nemtsov's white paper critiquing the Putin years. It includes the third and fourth chapters of the work. Part 1 (introduction and chapter one) appeared on Monday, Part 2 (chapter two) on Wednesday; look for Part 4 on Sunday. You can display all the parts in reverse sequence on a single web page by simply clicking the "nemtsov white paper" link at the bottom of this post.

Putin: the Bottom Line

by Boris Nemtsov

First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, 1997-1998

and

Vladimir Milov

Deputy Minister of Energy, 2002

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Chapter 3

Oh Dear, the Roads

Bad roads are an eternal issue in Russia. Recently, however, with oil money rolling in, the country has at last had an opportunity to modernise its road system. But the opportunity has been missed.

Under Putin’s rule, the road system has degraded at a fantastic rate. During his presidency, the overall length of hard roads has fallen by about 50,000 kilometres, from 750,000 to 700,000 kilometres. This has happened in the main as a result of wear and tear to roads that were officially counted as hard-surfaced – for example graveled – but which are subject to quick wear. More than a third of Russia’s roads are of this kind; if they are not regularly maintained, the only thing left of their hard surface is the designation.

That the length of hard-surfaced roads has fallen should be a matter of shame to a country with pretensions of being a “great power”; even some African countries have better roads than ours. Russia’s backwardness in the matter of roads is quite shocking. The total length of surfaced roads in Russia is 60% of France’s, half that of Japan, and a tenth of USA’s. Only about 35,000 kms of highway meet the standard for high-quality road (width greater than 7 metres and able to accommodate speeds of over 100 kph, i.e roads of no less than 2 lanes with a normal road surface). Finland has more surfaced roads of normal width than the whole of Russia does!

Only 40% of federal highways meet the standard for surface quality, width, and other parameters. Many of the federal highways have a capacity of not more than 40-50,000 vehicles per day, while real traffic amounts to 100,000+ vehicles per day. The drive from Moscow to the country’s main port – Novorossiisk – takes almost 48 hours; it would take only about 15 hours on a normal European motorway.

The road network provides poor links between cities and regions and many highways suddenly come to an end on reaching the frontier of the RF’s regions.

This is a problem which absolutely must be solved: without an effective road network, Russia remains broken up by region and its territorial unity is thus more phrase than fact. The poorly integrated transport system makes it difficult to balance the economies of the regions and makes them more depressed than they need be.

The Russian road network is in urgent need of modernisation yet the system for financing road repairs and building has to all intents and purposes collapsed under Putin. New roads opened have fallen from 6,600 kms in 2000 to a mere 2,400 kms in 2006. The proportion of worn-out roads in the network has risen from 26% in 2000 to 46% in 2005 – this while funding of the road system has actually increased: the 2000 consolidated budget for the road system was 60 billion rubles in 2000; in 2006 it was more that 220 billion [FN1]. It is easy to work out from this that the cost of opening one kilometre of new road has risen tenfold (or fivefold if one corrects for inflation). The scale of embezzlement in the road industry can thus be see to have increased fivefold.

Government money, of which there is much more thanks to oil exports, is being swallowed up by corruption. The much advertised Investfond [FN2], which the government hyped as the future main mover in the development of the country’s infrastructure, has been spent in the strangest of ways: of the $7 billion it released for use in 2007, $4 billion were paid out as contribution to commercial projects undertaken by large financial/industrial groups in Eastern Siberia and the construction of a petrochemical plant in Tatarstan. These are surely commercial projects that have no need of state financing. Furthermore, they can in no way be said to have anything to do with infrastructure developments of national importance. As far as road projects are concerned, practically all the money directed towards such matters –$2.5 billion – will go to projects connected with St. Petersburg: the Western High-Speed Link and the Orlov tunnel as well as a motorway linking Petersburg and Moscow.

St. Petersburg does of course need to modernise its infrastructure. But so too does the rest of the country. Investfond money could have been used to build decent highways linking the main towns of Central Russia – Moscow, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Perm, and Voronezh. But the money went to oligarchs and Petersburg regional projects instead.

It is much more efficient to attract private capital to road financing. However, under Putin, private business involved in infrastructure works has been decimated and long-term contracts with investors have been ‘reviewed’. One recalls in this connection the story of Domodedovo airport. This was modernised by Ist Lain, making it Russia’s first up-to-date and spacious airport. Following this modernisation, Putin’s civil servants managed to have the terms of the contract with Ist Lain reviewed in the government’s favour. This case (not to mention that of Yukos and other occasions when the government has revised its obligations to, and taken back assets from, investors) has seriously affected the mood of private investors. They now worry that the government will break its long-term contracts as soon as projects are completed and start to bring in income. One should therefore not hope too seriously for private investment in the road sector. This sector is financed solely from budget monies which are then for the most part embezzled.

We need to revive and develop our road system. The Soviet road network cannot meet the needs of a modern economy. We need a modern transport system that provides passengers and freight with high mobility, integrates Russia as an genuine economic whole, and put puts an end to the conditions leading to regional inequality. To do this, we need to improvem the quality of government development planning for the country’s transport system, put a stop to corruption in the allocation of funds to finance the road system, and be more active in attracting private investment in the transportation infrastructure. This will require of the government iron-disciplined observance of the law and contractual obligations. This cannot be achieved without a genuinely independent judiciary.

Russia will have to go living with bad roads while Putin’s team remains in power.

Things are going badly in the Caucasus. The news from just one day, last Tuesday, should be more than enough to make a hard man humble -- though perhaps not a hard psychopath like Vladimir Putin.

Yulia Latynina wrote in the Moscow Times about insurrection in Ingushtia. She tells the story of Maksharip Aushev, who was arrested by the Putin's secret police after he protested and investigated the arrest and torture of his nephew and son in the village of Narzan. She tell us:

Agents allegedly broke the young men's ribs, and drove them into the mountains to witness what is called 'Snickers' in certain circles. This is where police tie explosives to a corpse and detonate it, blowing the body into little pieces, which are then eaten by wild animals so that the victim's identity will never be established. This torture had no practical value in gaining evidence; the henchmen were just having fun. But their sadism backfired when people in Nazran took to the streets demanding the release of the pair. As a result of this public outcry, the cousins were released.

The secret police then burned down Aushev's brother's home and locked him up. Latynina observes: "People like Aushev are Russia's last hope. He conducted himself like a brave warrior. He did not adopt the terrorists' methods but fought his battle within the boundaries of the law. I don't think Putin likes these kinds of fighters."

Then the Associated Press told us that "Audit Chamber Chairman Sergei Stepashin on Tuesday warned that costs for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi are spiraling to double the amount planned." This puts the costs at more than $25 billion or nearly $200 for every man, woman and child in Russia - a full week's average wages for each. The AP states: "Sochi was one of the Soviet Union's most popular vacation spots, but development has not kept pace with Russia's general post-Soviet economic boom. Its lack of facilities and substandard infrastructure was seen as one of the bid's potential weak points, but strong government support proved persuasive to International Olympic Committee members." So, naturally, that was the spot Putin chose to host the Olympics.

These two events are horrifying enough on their own. Now, put them together. It's easy, because Ingushetia is right next door to Sochi and Chechnya. 2 + 2 = 0. Zero hope that the powder keg Putin has created in the Caucuses will not explode right about the time the games commence, that is if they manage to commence at all, sending the true cost of these "games" into the region of the imponderable, the inconceivable.

Think the Kremlin can't make this unimaginably bad situation even worse? Think again.

Turn back to the Moscow Times, and reporter David Nowak tells us that "an Uzbek man has been stabbed to death in southwestern Moscow, the fourth fatal attack on dark-skinned people in the city in the past five days." Nowak states: "A total of 67 people were killed and more than 550 injured nationwide in hate crimes last year, according to Sova Center statistics." And Russia is on pace to double that number of killings this year, with 23 in just the first six weeks of 2008. Nowak quotes Soyun Sadykov, who heads Azerross, a group representing Azeri citizens living in Russia: "We have these poor people coming to Russia in search of a better life -- to work, and to provide for their families. Instead of thanking them for providing the labor force in sectors that Muscovites wouldn't dream of occupying, we are cutting them up, stabbing them to death."

In other words, white Slavic Orthodox Russia is not only torturing and murdering in the Caucuses, but everywhere across the country, perhaps most especially in the nation's capital, where Vladimir Putin himself resides, building resentment among all the nation's dark-skinned peoples, practically inviting them to strike back. Meanwhile, it throws up in their faces a grandiose Olympic scheme, as if to say: "See what we prefer to do with our money, rather than to make a better life for you."

A famous French king, when asked why he chose to rule in such a profligate and self-destructive manner, answered: "Apres moi, le deluge." Putin is rumored to have squirreled away billions of ill-gotten dollars and to be in the process of erecting secret vacation homes in various corners of Europe. He's found a bird-brained sycophant to "succeed" him, which really means "take the blame, like the sap you are."

Speaking about the Kremlin's attack on the British Council, that successor (Dmitri Medvedev) said: "Try as I might, I cannot recall a single episode when the British government permitted Russian non- governmental organization to operate in Great Britain. I dare you try and register a Russian non-governmental organization in London." So it seems that the reason du jour for attacking the BC is to force Britain to accept Russian cultural institutions (never mind that most people in the world lack the slightest interest in Russia culture and would ignore such institutions, especially if they were run by clueless Russians, and never mind that the Kremlin never raised a single word of protest about such an issue before launching the attack). But yesterday, the reason was that the BC was violating Russian law. The day before that, it was a nest of spies. And the day before that, it was a sacrificial symbol of Russian outrage over Britain daring to investigate the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

Mr. Medvedev simply can't make up his mind, such as there is. Quite literally, he wants to have his cake and eat it too, just like his Soviet predecessors. And while he's consumed with winning the great battle against the British Council, he's not even aware of the apocalypse his government is creating in the Caucuses.

Great Russian patriot that Mr. Medvedev is, he loves Russia just the way Stalin did.

He loves it to death.

It seems that columnist Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal is taking a leadership role in issuing the clarion call to American journalists regarding the dangers of neo-Soviet Russia. Last time it was Russia's "torture colonies" and now a column called "Putin's Political Prisoners."

In its Soviet heyday, Moscow's dreaded Lefortovo prison served as a way station to the Gulag for political prisoners such as Yevgenia Ginzburg, Vladimir Bukovsky and Natan Sharansky. Under Vladimir Putin, it performs exactly the same function.

In December, Russian scientist Igor Reshetin was sentenced to 11½ years in a "strict regime" prison colony on charges of having sold dual-use technologies to China for its space programs. In 1996, Mr. Reshetin's company, TsNIIMASh-Export, was contracted to supply China with a series of technical reports, mostly dealing with the re-entry of spaceships into earth's atmosphere. The deal, worth about $30 million, represented about half of Russia's space-related exports to China at the time; business was expected to grow to about $100 million a year. In 2002, Mr. Reshetin submitted his reports to two expert government commissions, which certified that they contained no classified information.

By the next year, however, TsNIIMASh-Export was under investigation by Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the KGB's successor. In 2005, Mr. Reshetin, who suffers from heart disease, was remanded to Lefortovo, where he and a colleague spent two years before sentencing. During his trial, 62 publicly available monographs were produced to demonstrate that no secret information had been disclosed. "I have seen all the reports sent to China," Alexander Kraiko, a head of department at a Russian technical institute, told the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. "The information they contain was published in widely accessed print [publications] in Russian and in the U.S.A."

Given current conditions in Russia's penal colonies, which I described in this column last week, Mr. Reshetin's conviction amounts to a death sentence. Convicted with him are business associates Sergei Vizir (11 years), Mikhail Ivanov (five years), and Alexander Rozhkin (five years). Another business associate, Sergei Tverdokhlebov, spent two months in Lefortovo, signed a "voluntary confession," and died of a heart attack shortly thereafter.

Why were the authorities so hell-bent on punishing Mr. Reshetin? One theory is that Mr. Rashetin simply fell afoul a local FSB agent eager to justify his pay and win advancement by taking down a "spy." An almost identical scenario played out against another scientist, Valentin Danilov, who in 2004 was sentenced to 14 years in a penal colony on bogus charges of passing "secret" information to the Chinese -- information that had been declassified years earlier.

Even more strained was the case against Igor Sutyagin, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences' prestigious Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada, who was accused of illicitly disclosing details about Russia's nuclear posture. His "spying," too, amounted to a paper he had written based on open-source information (including speeches by Russia's own defense minister). Yet that didn't prevent a court from handing down a 15-year sentence. Similar convictions for "spying" have been handed down to at least four others: Anatoly Babkin; Oskar Kaibyshev; Vladimir Shchurov and Grigory Pasko.

The second theory about Mr. Reshetin's case is that he fell victim to the Kremlin's habit of criminalizing its (business) competitors: in this case the state-owned arms-maker Rosvoorushenie, which Novaya Gazeta speculates may have wanted a piece of a lucrative market that Mr. Reshetin was inconveniently making his own.

If so, that makes the case similar to that of former energy giant Yukos, whose assets were looted by Gazprom and other Kremlin-connected entities in 2004. While former CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky's indefinite imprisonment in a Siberian penal colony has attracted widespread media notice, less attention is paid to the 41 other Yukos defendants. One of them, lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, was arrested in 2004 on charges of tax evasion and forbidden from speaking to her two young children for nearly six months. In 2006, her request to have her sentence suspended until her youngest child turns 14 was denied; instead, she was immediately transferred to a penal colony several hundred miles south of Moscow, where she is serving a 6½ year sentence.

Then there is the case of Vasily Aleksanyan, another Yukos lawyer, who was diagnosed with HIV shortly after his 2006 arrest. Russian authorities refused to treat him throughout most of his nearly 700-day pretrial detention; he is now being held in a medical facility, handcuffed to his bed. Drew Holiner, Mr. Aleksanyan's lawyer, says the authorities' motive is to force his client "to give false testimony against former colleagues in return for some form of deal." Their gambit may not succeed, since Mr. Aleksanyan is said to be suffering from an AIDS-related lymphoma and may soon die.

Though smaller in scope and ferocity, the Yukos case shares some of the notorious characteristics of a Soviet purge, particularly the effort to manufacture a "conspiracy" by bringing charges against a wide array of individuals.

The Soviet touch is also in evidence in the case of Larisa Ivanovna Arap. A member of Garry Kasparov's United Civic Front, Ms. Arap had campaigned on behalf of abused children in Russia's psychiatric hospitals. Last July, she herself was involuntarily detained at a psychiatric hospital on account of a critical article she had written, "shot up with psychotropic drugs," according to her husband, and held for over a month. Though she was released after public protest, a local district court issued the opinion that her hospitalization had been perfectly legal. As in the Soviet period, mere criticism of the performance of a state institution may now suffice as evidence of mental derangement.

In her acclaimed history of the Gulag, Anne Applebaum observes that under Stalin one could easily get arrested "for nothing," whereas under his successors arrests usually happened "for something -- if not for a genuine criminal act, then for . . . literary, religious, or political opposition to the Soviet system." Of the many things that make present trends in Russia so worrying, surely one is that the line between "something" and "nothing" is becoming increasingly blurred.

In a nice bit of reporting that's only about six months late, the New York Times reveals that Russia relied on American ingenuity in order to make its visit to the sea floor below the polar ice cap, then -- as is its wont -- tried to claim the credit for itself, stabbing the American in the back.

Last August, a team of Russian scientists and legislators trekked to the North Pole and plunged through the ice pack into the abyss, descending more than two miles through inky darkness to the bottom of the ocean. There, explorers planted Russia’s flag and, upon surfacing, declared that the feat had strengthened Moscow’s claims to nearly half the Arctic seabed. The ensuing global headlines fueled debate over polar territorial claims.

But that wasn’t the whole story. The heroes of the moment did not mention that the dive had American origins. Alfred S. McLaren, 75, a retired Navy submariner, would like to set the record straight and, as he puts it, “acquaint the Kremlin with the realities” of recent history and international law. A major figure of Arctic science and exploration who spent nearly a year in operations under the ice, Dr. McLaren says he developed the polar dive plan and repeatedly shared his labors with the Russians and their partners — a claim he supports with numerous e-mail messages and documents.

The Russians, for their part, acknowledge that Dr. McLaren played a central role in the dive’s origins. But they say he took no part in substantive planning and logistics. Dr. McLaren’s plan drew on federal polar data and recommended specific sensors and methods to ensure a safe return. “I wrote the procedures for the dive,” he said in an interview. The Russians, he added, “went for the territorial claim.” Don Walsh, a pioneer of deep ocean diving who worked on the Arctic plan with the Russians, backed the account. The divers, Dr. Walsh wrote in an e-mail message, “did not develop the original idea, the operational plan and they did not pay for it” because wealthy tourists picked up the bill. “I am sure,” he added, “that this example of how to steal your way to fame will become a legend in the history of exploration.”

The Russians say they took little or nothing. “Talk is cheap,” Anatoly M. Sagalevitch, the expedition’s chief scientist, said in an interview. “But real operation, this is different.” President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has made the most of the divers’ feat, personally greeting them upon their return and announcing last month that Dr. Sagalevitch and two other team members would be named Heroes of Russian Federation, the nation’s highest honorary title.

Dr. McLaren first got to know the Russians through the lens of a periscope. As a submariner, he conducted more than 20 secret missions during the cold war, mainly in nuclear attack submarines. Three of his voyages ventured beneath the Northern ice pack, gauging its thickness, probing the dark waters below and bouncing sound waves off the bottom to map the craggy seabed. An important goal was to find safe submarine routes near the Soviet Union in case the cold war turned hot. Over all, he spent nearly a year under the polar ice. In 1972, he won the Distinguished Service Medal, the military’s highest peacetime award. He left the Navy in 1981 and earned a Ph.D. in polar studies from the University of Colorado in 1986. After the cold war, Dr. McLaren began working with his former enemies, lecturing aboard Russian icebreakers that carried tourists to the North Pole. He did so repeatedly while president of the Explorers Club, a post he held from 1996 to 2000. The idea for a polar dive arose in early 1997 when a television journalist, Jack McDonald, had dinner with Dr. McLaren and asked if anyone had ever gone to the bottom. The two decided to explore the possibility. “We spent a lot time on it,” recalled Mr. McDonald, who planned to make a documentary. The team envisioned going down in a submersible — a small craft with a super-strong personnel sphere that typically carries a pilot and two observers. Tiny portholes designed to withstand crushing pressures let the occupants peer out. A dive is typically an all-day affair, requiring hours to go down to the bottom and back up.

Later in 1997, Dr. McLaren attracted the interest of Mike McDowell, an adventure tour operator who organized the polar voyages. The next year, Dr. Sagalevitch, who runs Moscow’s twin Mir submersibles, came aboard. In 1999, the three men began diving in the Mirs to visit the deteriorating remains of the Titanic and the Bismarck. The dives were seen as practice runs for the polar plunge. All told, Dr. McLaren dived in the cramped submersibles five times. In 2001, Dr. McLaren wrote a polar dive plan for Dr. Sagalevitch in Moscow. Drawing on decades of federal polar data, it gave information like mean ice thickness (about 8 feet), water depth (about 2.6 miles) and salinity near the bottom (34 to 36 parts per thousand). “Jagged underwater projections and spurs,” the plan warned, could endanger a submersible.

The document, seven pages long, paid special attention to making sure the returning Mirs could find the hole through which they had entered the Arctic Ocean and not become trapped beneath the thick surface ice. It called for special upward-looking sensors. “Thank you for your recommendations,” Dr. Sagalevitch wrote in an e-mail message after receiving the plan. For several years the Explorers Club, based in New York City, marketed North Pole dives to adventure tourists. A cabin would be $16,000, a suite $21,000. The actual dive beneath the pole: $50,000 extra. Despite a flurry of interest, the spectacle did not materialize.

By 2005, the plan collapsed. In a bitter e-mail exchange, Dr. McLaren accused Mr. McDowell, the tour operator, of abruptly removing him from the polar dive roster and evading commitments that would have aided fund-raising. “You did not bother to answer any of my messages,” he wrote. Mr. McDowell in turn accused Dr. McLaren of failing to recruit dive sponsors and defended his removal as necessary because of rising costs and the need to attract more paying tourists. “I do all the work and take all the financial risk,” he added. Dr. Walsh, who worked with both men, laid the rupture to personality conflicts. “We were top-heavy in chiefs and needed more braves,” he said.

Another factor was the Kremlin, which was seeking new displays of geopolitical muscle. It seized control of the project. On Aug. 2, 2007, Dr. Sagalevitch and Mr. McDowell descended to the bottom, taking along two Moscow legislators. The polar dive was part publicity stunt and part symbolic move to enhance the Kremlin’s disputed claim to nearly half the Arctic seabed. It made global headlines, with much comment on Moscow’s new swagger. Time magazine’s cover article asked, “Who Owns the Arctic?” After the dive, many nations sharpened their claims. Denmark mapped icy regions. The United States mounted a polar expedition. And Canada unveiled plans for an Arctic military base. “The first principle of Arctic sovereignty,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada said in a much quoted statement, “is use it or lose it.”

Dr. McLaren grew livid as the dive’s impact spread. He now ridicules the Russian territorial claims as not only empty but duplicitous because of his unacknowledged contribution. He said, however, that he harbored no hard feelings against the Mir team. For his part, Mr. McDowell vigorously denied any fault and said any aid from Dr. McLaren was immaterial to the Russian feat. “What he’s saying is complete rubbish,” Mr. McDowell said from Australia, where he lives. “He’s all bent out of shape because he wanted to be first to the pole. Well, it just didn’t work out that way.” Dr. Sagalevitch confirmed that the original idea for the polar dive arose with the Westerners but said that he and his team had developed it exclusive of Dr. McLaren’s advice since 1998. “Fred was so far from any dive plan,” he said. “He doesn’t understand the technical side of the operation. He doesn’t understand the submersible.”

If there are fireworks, they may erupt March 15, when the Explorers Club will hold its annual dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. All the dive planners and doers are to be there, with Dr. Sagalevitch getting an award for excellence in ocean science. It will be a bittersweet moment for Dr. McLaren, who helped Dr. Sagalevitch and Mr. McDowell become members when he was club president. At the dinner, the Russian dive team is to complete a triumph: returning a club flag that it carried to the polar seabed. Dr. McLaren said he planned to go to the dinner but might excuse himself from the room when the flag was returned.

Vladimir Socor in a Eurasia Daily Monitor e-mail:

On February 17 Kosova declared officially its independence from Serbia. On February 18 the United States and several major European countries recognized Kosova as an independent state. More than 20 (out of 27) European Union member countries are prepared to extend recognition.

Russia anticipated this outcome some weeks, if not months, ahead of its occurrence. By the end of 2007 Moscow had started backtracking on its retaliatory threats to recognize the “independence” of post-Soviet secessionist territories. It had to backtrack, lest its warnings be exposed as the bluff they were.

Moscow’s threat to use Kosova’s secession as a “precedent” or “model” for resolving post-Soviet conflicts was never a credible threat, unless the Kremlin was bent on incurring severe damage and no gain to its policies on a wide range of interests: Relations with the West, with CIS countries (far beyond those immediately affected by secessions) and with international organizations, as well as Russia’s own security situation in the North Caucasus would have been severely jeopardized.

Those anxious about Russian exploitation of a Kosova “precedent” overlooked the fact that Moscow remains more than content to exploit the existing, “frozen” situation in the unresolved conflicts. This it can continue doing effectively and at low cost to itself, as long as the West does not prioritize the resolution of the post-Soviet conflicts.

Indications are now multiplying that Moscow has blinked on its most specific threat: that to “recognize the independence” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Russia had singled out these two Georgian territories as prime candidates for “recognition.” This line of attack contradicted Moscow’s own claim that resolution of all secessionist conflicts in Europe and the world must follow a "common model” or “single standard.” In practice, its blatant selectivity about Abkhazia and South Ossetia reflected Moscow’s special enmity toward Georgia, the immediate territorial proximity (whereas Karabakh and Transnistria are not contiguous to Russia), and the Russian policy of allowing Armenia de facto a free hand in Karabakh, while Moscow claims de facto a free hand in the two Georgian territories.

Largely for those reasons, Moscow had conferred Russian citizenship en masse in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, so as to claim a right of intrusive protection there, including military presence. At the same time it left the issues of citizenship and security protection in Karabakh up to Armenia. And it has been negotiating with Moldova since 2006 regarding a settlement that would leave Transnistria within Moldova, in return for a certain measure of Russian political and military oversight over a Moldovan state “reunified” in that way.

These highly differentiated, expediency-based approaches nullified from the outset Russia’s argument about a “Kosovo precedent” with general applicability. Had it applied such a “precedent” unilaterally in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the Kremlin would have been exposed as singularizing Georgia and targeting it for a wanton act of aggression. With Russian troops and Russian-appointed local leaders already deployed in those two enclaves, any Russian “recognition” would have been seen worldwide as open military occupation and annexation. Moscow did not need to risk such a scenario, since the existing unresolved situation suits Russian purposes too well.

As Kosova’s declaration of independence and Western recognition drew near, Moscow must have concluded that its threats against Georgia were unusable threats. Consequently, Moscow seems to be seeking a face-saving exit from a political impasse into which it has driven itself. Suddenly the Kremlin is downplaying its all-to-recent, dire warnings.

In his annual news conference (the final one of his presidency) on February 14, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced Western intentions to recognize Kosova as “unlawful,” and the argument about Kosova’s uniqueness as (Western) “lies.” But Putin went on to declare that Russia would not let itself be provoked into similar “unlawful” actions: “What will we do if they start recognizing Kosovo’s independence unilaterally? We are not going to play the fool. If someone takes a bad decision it does not mean that we should act in the same way. I repeat, we will not play the fool by doing the same thing, acting as if this [Russian recognition of post-Soviet secessions] is a necessary consequence” (Interfax, February 14).

On February 15, Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov received the Abkhaz and South Ossetian de facto leaders, Sergei Bagapsh and Eduard Kokoiti, in Moscow. The Russian communiqués referred to them as “presidents,” by the usage adopted several years ago. Lavrov, as well as accompanying statements by the Russian MFA, merely said that Russia, in light of Kosova, would “reconsider” (peresmotrit) its policy regarding Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Further on the vague tone, Russia would “undoubtedly take [Kosova] into account in Russia’s relations with Abkhazia and South Ossetia” (Interfax, February 15, 16). Thus Putin’s, Lavrov’s, and other Russian MFA statements were worded so as to stop short of repeating previous warnings about recognizing those two secessions.

On February 18, Russia’s Duma and Federation Council released a joint statement condemning the Western recognition of Kosova, but stopping short of warnings about “recognition” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The Russian parliament had in recent years adopted a series of resolutions that contained such warnings. Sukhumi and Tskhinvali hoped for more of the same, more than ever now; but they were disappointed. Moreover, the joint statement was adopted quietly by the two chambers’ Councils (leaderships), not the plenums, and without any of the customary fanfare.

At the moment, Moscow wants the Kosova issue returned to the UN Security Council, ostensibly in order to reverse Kosova’s independence and halt its recognition (Interfax, February 15, 16). Such resort to the UNSC also signifies the beginning of a face-saving retreat from the previous show of intransigence. Referring this issue to the UNSC at this point is tantamount to burying it in that veto-bound forum, without openly acknowledging defeat. With this move, Moscow plays to Greater Serbian nationalism, but has no hope to change the situation on the ground.

The CIS summit, scheduled for February 21 in Moscow, should further restrain Russian rhetoric about Abkhazia and South Ossetia. No CIS country ever associated itself with Russian threats to recognize the secession of those two Georgian territories. Should Putin revert to such threats, he might at best find himself in the company of Belarus President Alyaksandr Lukashenka (though even this does not seem very likely). Even Armenia would not risk its relations with Georgia by endorsing such Russian threats against Armenia’s neighbor country and lifeline to the world. Azerbaijan and Moldova, which face secessions and military occupations of their territories, would condemn any Russian “recognition” of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. It would also be condemned by Ukraine and Kazakhstan, both of which reckon with possible Russian exploitation of ethnic issues on their territories.

Moscow’s two-year old bluff has been called in Kosova. While Russian policy remains unpredictable (particularly during the presidential transition in the Kremlin), any Russian leverage through the threat of recognizing the post-Soviet secessions seems to have run out.

The Associated Press reports:

In the final weeks of Russia's presidential election, the three major TV networks and much of the media are filled with uncritical and often fawning coverage of the man President Vladimir Putin has blessed as his successor. Some of Russia's bloggers, however, have been sharply critical of First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, and the presidential contest he seems certain of winning.

One blogger named "lekka_reka" said an old lady asked him on the street: "Have they named Medvedev president yet or will we be able to actually go out and cast our votes?"

A blogger named "YUGva" was worried about Medvedev's liberal image. "This Medvedev is a strange personality, a dark horse," YUGva wroe. "Like my relatives, I think he's just going to skip out on Russia, sell it to America and the West — and everyone is openly lauding his arrival?"

The postings by Russia's Web commentators, professionals and amateurs alike, are sometimes barbed, frequently satirical and always unfiltered — a marked contrast to most of Russia's major media, where many reporters, editors and producers are wary of incurring the Kremlin's wrath. During Putin's eight years in office, the Kremlin has extended and strengthened its control over the news media, mainly through the purchase of national broadcasters and major newspapers by state-controlled corporations or loyal billionaires. Anyone interested in probing reporting or frank commentary has few places to turn. Increasingly, relatively savvy Russians are turning to the Internet. "The propaganda on TV doesn't work for anyone anymore," said Oleg Panfilov, a journalist advocate who is also a regular blogger.

The Internet's uncontrolled nature has long worried the Kremlin. Parliament's upper house is considering legislation that would make Web sites with more than 1,000 readers daily subject to the same regulations as print media. And some Web advocates fear a newly updated law on publishing allegedly extremist literature could be used to prosecute bloggers critical of authorities. There are also allegations the Kremlin has organized teams of bloggers to attack or rebut critics of the government through Web postings. But Stanislav Belkovsky, an analyst with the Moscow think-tank National Strategy Institute, said these pro-Kremlin bloggers have little influence. "No one's interested in people who write the same thing as you can read in the pro-Kremlin newspapers," he said.

Communicating across Russia — which spans 11 time zones — has always been difficult, and Russian leaders have long relied on television to reach the nation's widely scattered communities. Russian television has provided intensive — and to many boring — coverage of Medvedev's speeches and official appearances at schools, churches, factories and other institutions for more than a year, as it has done for Putin. But on the Web, news consumers can find spicier fare. A recent search for Medvedev or Putin on a Russia's dominant blogging and social networking site, LiveJournal, pulled up a hubbub of humorous postings, satire, opinion, links to news stories, insults and counter-insults.

One blogger from Vladivostok sought to organize a boycott of March election under the banner: "I'm not participating in this farce." Another from St. Petersburg, who took the name "dark cloud_os," wrote that a monarchy would suit Russia better than democracy.

Yet another, named "niagara1977," said that reading an obituary would have been more interesting than listening to a recent Putin speech.

Putin is enormously popular, and even some journalists are angered when he is sharply questioned. Yet even before Putin had finished the last news conference of his term on Feb. 14, the Russian blogosphere was scoffing at some of his remarks. "President Putin has told us that we are satisfied with his work," wrote one blogger by the name of "vla3986." "If you include ripping off the country until you can't any more as his work, then that's been done many times over."

Another blogger, who called himself "dmitrydmitryev," wrote: "I wanted to watch Putin's news conference but I happily slept throught it. For the best, probably!"

Still, Russian political blogs don't appear to be as popular or influential as they are in the United States. Partly that's because of the Kremlin's near monopoly on political power in Russia. The Web's influence is also restricted because access is limited. The phone system is antiquated, meaning connections are slow. Internet service is difficult to find in poorer provinces and personal computers are still a luxury.

Candidates in the U.S. are battling in a cliffhanger presidential contest. With the Kremlin's political weight behind him, Medvedev is all but certain of winning the March 2 vote.

"Everyone understands that this is a fiction," said Rustem Adagamov, who writes a wide-ranging, popular blog under the moniker "other." "Everyone knows the outcome ahead of time."

Reuters reports:

The head of a New York-based human rights group accused Russia on Wednesday of "bureaucratic harassment" of civil groups critical of the Kremlin after he was denied a visa to travel to Moscow.

The comments by Human Rights Watch head Kenneth Roth came two weeks before a presidential election opposition groups say furnishes Vladimir Putin's chosen successor with blanket media coverage. Europe's human rights watchdog, the OSCE, has opted not to field observers, citing lack of official cooperation. Roth had been due to present a report in Moscow that said new laws on non-governmental organizations (NGOs) were being used to crack down on groups the Kremlin does not like. "This is precisely the kind of bureaucratic harassment NGOs across Russia are facing," the HRW Executive Director told Reuters by telephone from New York when asked about his visa problems. "It's up to the whim of the government to decide who to single out and it tends to single out groups that are somehow trying to hold it accountable," Roth told Reuters.

When asked by Reuters to comment on Roth's case, Russia's foreign ministry said it could only respond to questions submitted in writing. Reuters sent questions by fax but there was no reply. Human Rights Watch said Roth was the first member of staff to have been denied a visa to travel to Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union. "The story changed every day, it was always some kind of technical reason, we should have applied for this kind of visa or that kind of visa," Roth told Reuters. "It's also the first time that I personally have been refused a visa any place in the world since Nigeria's Sani Abacha did so in 1997," Roth earlier told a news conference in Moscow by telephone.

Roth's NGO and other rights groups attack what they call a deterioration in Russia's human rights record during the eight-year rule of President Putin. Putin is due to step down after a March 2 election almost certain to be won by his chosen successor, Dmitry Medvedev.

CHOKING EFFECT

The Human Rights Watch report said a 2006 Russian law "grants state officials excessive powers to interfere in the funding and operation of NGOs". The NGOs facing the most scrutiny are those "dealing with Chechnya, human rights... anyone receiving funds from abroad or anyone trying to express or mobilize dissent," Roth said. He rejected allegations by Russian officials that some NGOs are a front for foreign intelligence agencies trying to undermine the Kremlin. "The groups that have been targeted are receiving completely legitimate private funds. There has been no evidence whatsoever intelligence money is the focus of this," Roth said. "It's just another excuse - the point isn't the foreign funding, the point is the public criticism."

Russia's parliament passed the 2006 law to tighten regulation of NGOs after a series of revolutions in neighboring ex-Soviet states unnerved the Kremlin with their well-organized civil society movements.

The Telegraph reports:

Russia's ambitions to become the world's pre-eminent arms exporter have suffered a setback after Algeria told the Kremlin it wanted to send back 15 fighter jets because they were sub-standard. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, the president of Algeria, met Vladimir Putin in Moscow yesterday to discuss the dispute, which has taken the gloss off a $3.7 billion (£1.9 billion) deal signed in 2006. Algerian military chiefs have allegedly complained that the aircraft, the first of a consignment of 36 MiG29 jets, were second-hand rather than new and proved faulty during initial testing. Moscow denied the allegations. Russia's state-owned defence industries have denied that the agreement was close to collapse, but there have been private concessions that more sophisticated aircraft will have to be offered as part of a face-saving deal.

Mr Putin has personally backed plans to re-energise arms sales in an effort to demonstrate Russia's growing international influence. By expanding into markets that the West has ignored, Russia's arms exports are growing by 25 per cent a year. After lucrative deals with Syria, Iran, Burma and Sudan, Russia is the world's second biggest arms dealer after America. But as exports have grown, so too has criticism of its reputation as a quality arms merchant, with some saying that Moscow was overly dependent on an ageing stockpile of Soviet military "left-overs".

(1) Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Putin, Part 2

(2) EDITORIAL: La Cosa Nashi

(3) Annals of Virulent Russian Racism

(4) Paul Joyal: Still a Mystery

NOTE: On Publius Pundit we point out that "lowly" Pakistan has just shown itself more democratic, and hence more fit for G-8 membership (Pakistan also has nuclear weapons) than "mighty" Russia, and we congratulate NATO on it is decisive victory over Russia in the first real battle of the new Cold War. These events reveal the Putin regime for what it is, an abject failure, a government of thieves.

NOTE: This is the second part of a serialized translation of Boris Nemtsov's white paper critiquing the Putin years. Part 1 appeared on Monday, look for Part 3 on Friday.

Putin: the Bottom Line

by Boris Nemtsov

First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, 1997-1998

and

Vladimir Milov

Deputy Minister of Energy, 2002

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

Chapter 2: The Army That Got Forgot

Putin really needed to use the country’s oil windfall to help meet the modernisation needs of the Russian Armed Forces.

This was the time to arm the army adequately. However actual arms deliveries and even plans for re-equipment have been scandalously low. According to data from the Council for National Strategy published in November 2007 published in a report entitled Results under Vladimir Putin: Crisis and Decay of the Russian Army, between 2000 and 2006, the Armed Forces received deliveries of only 27 ICBMs (27 warheads) while 294 (1779 warheads) were written off. In the penniless years 1992-1999, the army received 92 ICBMs (92 warheads). Since the year 2000, only 3 new aircraft have been delivered: one Tu-160 and two Su-34s. Around 100 aircraft were delivered during the 1990s. Since the year 2000, a little over 60 T90 tanks have been purchased while the total for the 1990s was 120. During the same decade, the Navy and seaborne frontier forces took delivery of over 50 surface and subsurface vessels. The figure for the current decade is less than ten^[1]. The state armaments programme for 2007-2015 plans to deliver a mere 60 aircraft to the armed forces in that time. This means that it will take … 80 years …. to renew our existing air fleet.

But the main blow has been against the most important element of Russia’s military potential, the support of the country’s sovereignty – the strategic nuclear forces. During the Putin years, Russia’s strategic nuclear forces have decayed at a frightening rate. More data from the Council for National Strategy’s report quoted above shows that between 2000 and 2007 the strategic nuclear forces wrote off 405 delivery units and 2498 warheads (as against 505 warheads only in the 1990s, during which time 60 new delivery units were bought while the army also took delivery of 1960 Tu-95 and Tu-160 strategic bombers). Under Putin, only 27 rockets have been produced – three times fewer than in the 1990s. So while Russia was overall able during the 1990s to maintain its nuclear potential at the level of that which it had inherited from the USSR, under Putin its reduction has become a serious threat to national security.

Furthermore, while the numbers of relatively invulnerable silo-based and RT-23^[2] rail-mobile ICBMs (these latter look like standard refrigerated rail cars, which make them difficult to keep track of) were reduced, the armed forces continued to be given mobile Topol^[3] units that are highly vulnerable (these are 100-ton, 22-metre-long road-mobile units which can easily be found by optical, radar and infrared intelligence).

One hardly need say how important a country’s strategic nuclear force is to its sovereignty. One might even say that no SNF = no sovereignty. The rest of today’s armed forces are most unlikely to be able to resist large-scale attack by a strong aggressor. If Russia’s nuclear arsenal continues to be shrunk at current rates, by the middle of the next decade Russia’s SNF will have at its disposal no more that 300 ICBMs and 600 warheads. In that case, it is questionable if it will be able to perform its nuclear deterrence function: it becomes possible for an aggressor to make a disarming non-nuclear strike with high accuracy weapons to annihilate practically all of Russia’s nuclear strike power and take out the few rockets that the country does manage to launch with its anti-missile defence capability. China’s strategic nuclear force will equal that of Russia in the next 10 years or maybe even exceed it.

There’s no sensible response to the endless jabber about “sovereignty” as the main aim of Putin’s policies if in reality the main factor in that sovereignty – the strategic nuclear deterrent – has been undermined under Putin.

And while the army receives scandalously small amounts of armaments, most of what is produced goes for export. In the 1990s, Russian arms exports amount to an average of just over $1 billion a year. In 2007, income from arms exports amounted to $7 billion. We arm foreign armies, including those of potential opponents – China first and foremost. These foreign armies are supplied with many times more Russian armaments than our own. The arms export monopoly is run by Rosoboronexport, headed by yet another Peterburger and friend-of-Putin Sergei Chemizov. How the income from arms exports, which should be deliberately used to finance the modernisation of our Armed Forces, is actually used is kept totally opaque.

The efficiency of our military-industrial complex remains low and deployments of modern weapons to the armed forces are constantly delayed. Although the government promised that it would soon test a 5th generation fighter aircraft, no engine has yet been developed for it. The first samples of a new anti-aircraft/anti-missile weapon system designated the S-400^[4] was finally deployed only in 2007 although they had initially been promised for 2000. Deployment of the Iskander^[5] theater quasi-ballistic missile, first promised for 2003, has still not taken place: trials have not yet been completed. Test of the naval Bulava^[6] missile should so far be considered unsuccessful. Three unfinished strategic submarines await it at the Severodvinsk shipyard; no one knows what will happen to them and who will be responsible for the money wasted on their production if the Bulava is never deployed.

The military-industrial complex’s technology lag behind other countries is increasing. The Su-34 fighter and the T-90 tank are both mere modifications of earlier series. No clear R&D programme for future weapons and equipment has been developed. Furthermore, in the absence of a clear military doctrine, it is impossible to define a proper strategy for supplying the armed forces with weapons and equipment: we do not properly understand who are our friends and who our potential enemies, our generals still go on preparing for a large-scale war with the USA while Russia remains unprepared and without defence against real threats, in particular from China (of which more below).

In the absence of effective public oversight of military defence expenditure, corruption flourishes and the cost of government orders are grossly inflated. “The amount by which we fail to meet government defence orders increases yearly and the percentage by which we fail to meet the demand increases in direct proportion to the increased budget allocated to the defence orders,” said Federal Minister and Deputy Head of the Military-Industrial Commission V. Putilin in Yekaterinburg on 19 April 2007. In 2006 the price of a T-90 tank made by the Uralvagonzavod works was 42 million rubles. By early 2007 the price was 58 million. In the 11 years it took to make the strategic nuclear submarine Yuri Dolgoruky, its development costs rose by a factor of seven.

Dubious initiatives by Putin to create industrial defence “holdings” run by his Petersburg friends have not helped matters. The monopolisation of armaments R&D and production is a dead-end route. Even in Soviet times competition between R&D bureaus and military-industrial plants was maintained in order to ensure competitivity. It is now being proposed to create monopolies not only in R&D and arms production but also to have a monopoly supplier to the armed forces (a sole purchasing agency called Rossiiskie Tekhnologii) to be headed yet again by presidential friend Chemizov. The state corporations are multiplying, Putin’s friends are getting richer, and the army remains without the arms and equipment it needs.

There are still over 157 thousand families of servicemen without housing. Of these over 70 thousand do not have permanent accommodation^[7]. In 1997, one of the authors of this document, when in the government, first managed to get something serious done about this problem: a Presidential Ukaz #1062 of 30 September 1997 “On Improving Housing Availability for Service Personnel and Certain Other Categories” was promulgated. Back then, the country’s income from exports was tiny but somehow or other we still managed to house about one hundred thousand servicemen’s families under the programme.

A lot could have been done while oil prices were high but the number of homeless servicemen has not dropped. In 2006, Putin announced the start of the new “presidential” 15+15 programme for the provision of housing to servicemen yet that year only 6500 new flats were made ready. Another 12000 were planned for 2007. Something is being done but why delay for so long?

All attempts to reform the manning of the Armed Forces have failed. The transition to a call-up of only one year was not properly thought through and has only made matters worse. By 2009, the Ministry of Defence will come up against an inevitable army manpower crisis: due to a call-up of only one year, the army will need to enroll 700,000 young men each year but by 2009 only 843,000 such people will be reaching the age of eighteen. The authorities will have to cancel all deferments and this will put the whole existing education system into disarray.

In addition, the quality of the contingent which is called up does not meet the needs of armies formed in this way. In January 2008, the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, General Smirnov told journalists that 30% of the total number of young men called up in the autumn round were found to be unsuitable for military service and over 50% had health problems preventing their deployment to specialised forces^[8]. In other words, this means that we simply do not have the population with which to maintain a called-up army and any talk about its being unacceptable to do away with military service is just cheap demagoguery.

Instead of developing a system for the reserve mobilisation of citizens in case of potential emergencies, the Ministry of Defence is continuing with its policy of filling barracks with called-up youths. Meanwhile, the dedovshchina problem^[9] is not going away. It is important to understand that dedovshchina is not just “something that happens” in some units, but a deliberately cultivated and condoned system providing a criminal way of managing the troops by allowing seniors to abuse juniors. A stop must be put to this criminal practice and the Russian Army must complement itself by becoming a contract force.

Abolishing the general call-up will not be easy but is absolutely necessary. It is nowadays fashionable to talk of the development of Russia’s “human potential” as one of the main aims of government policy. However, it is difficult to imagine a greater blow to the Russian nation’s human potential than calling up its young in the flower of youth to forced slavery.

Putin’s way of turning the army into a professional force looks like either nonsense or sabotage: professional recruits are paid a pittance – in 2007, salaries in Russia averaged 12,000 rubles while the average pay of contract soldiers does not exceed 6-8,000 rubles.^[10]

Forgotten, poorly equipped, badly paid, homeless, recruits unfit to fight, dedovshchina – that is what Armed Forces look like if one looks behind the curtain of Putin’s management. Russia needs a massive reform of its military.

The point of this reform shoul not be just a change in recruitment policy. A contract army is not a synonym for a professional one. The point is that Russia needs to be clear on its long-term plans for the military and needs to develop a radically new, modern and effective force.

Such an army will need a régime of greater openness. Greater public oversight over the financing and pricing of new equipment will also be required. The old opaque and corrupt arms purchasing system must be abolished – no more monopolies. The military budget must be open for all to see except for such things as the development of new weaponry and other secret design work. The army’s purchasing budget should be published on the Internet (as the American military do) and competition rules established.

We need to go over to a contract army as soon as possible, first in the high-tech units and later in the rest. This change of recruitment principle should be used as much as possible for the formation of new units placed parallel to existing ones in order to keep the new units clean of the burden of the old negative traditions of corruption and poor treatment of men. The pay of contract soldiers should be sharply increased to a level corresponding to their skills. Army pay should be approximately 20% higher than average pay in Russia as this will make the army competitive on the labour market. Contract soldiers should be able to get mortgages for their housing and after 10 years service be allocated housing free.

We must without delay begin a full-scale reform of the military in order to make it transparent, to ensure public oversight, to re-equip it, and to turn it into a professional army. The state’s present financial position means that it is possible to do this. Putin already had one chance of doing this but essentially forgot about the military in this highly favourable period of our history. We need new politicians in power if we want to be reliably defended.

Last week, Russian "president" Vladimir Putin threatened to target Ukraine with nuclear missiles if it dared to join NATO or accept the deployment of a NATO defensive missile system on its territory. Putin stated: "It's frightening not just to talk about this, but even to think about, that in response to such deployment, the possibility of such deployments - and one can't theoretically exclude these deployments - that Russia will have to point its warheads at Ukrainian territory."

Putin's statement borders on the insane. To credit it, one would first have to believe him, his word alone, when he says Russia isn't currently targeting Ukraine. Yet, Putin isn't willing to accept NATO's word that accepting Ukraine as a member or placing defensive missile systems on its territory has no impact, in fact or intention, upon Russian security. Yet, Putin is a proud veteran of the KGB, who has spent his entire life lying brazenly to anyone who would listen.

Beyond that, Putin doesn't seem to realize that if Russia escalates cold war tensions, then NATO -- far more powerful than Russia -- will do the same. Places in Russia will be targeted that never were before, and an arms race Russia can't even compete in, much less win, will begin so that even more places will be targeted. More money will be spent developing defensive systems that will negate Russian missiles, and in short the arms race that destroyed the USSR will begin all over again.

Then, Putin seems to ignore the basic reality that, quite obviously, Russian policy towards Ukraine -- his policy -- has failed totally. He has convinced Ukraine that Russia is dangerous and that it needs protection. Even now, as he issues bellicose and provocative rhetoric, Putin does nothing to mollify Ukraine's concerns or to alter Russian policy in any way. In other words, he's acting towards Ukraine exactly the way he complains NATO is acting towards him. Only Russians can offer the world a level of hypocrisy this spectacular.

Putin also seems to believe that Ukraine is a nation of cowards. He apparently thinks he can just glower menacingly at Ukraine and it will back down, submitting to Russia's will just as if it were still the good old days of the USSR. History shows that, in fact, Ukraine is a mighty nation of brave patriots who will stand up to Russia no matter what, as many other former Soviet slave states have also shown, especially Georgia. Putin's actions, he is too blind and stupid to see, actually lead Ukraine to still closer alliance with NATO, exactly the opposite of the result he claims to want.

Putin is governing his nation in the manner of the mafia. When Russia deals with the United States, it demands verbal negotiation and respect. But when Russia deals with Ukraine, it immediately resorts to blunt trauma, threats and actual violence. Though the thinks he is showing strength, in fact Putin is showing epidemic weakness and hypocrisy. As we reported on Publius Pundit, Russia has suffered a stinging and emphatic defeat in the first major battle of Cold War II with Kosovo declaring independence from Serbia, flouting Russian power in the region, and the major European nations joining the U.S. in standing solidly behind Kosovo. A feeble Putin could do nothing except issue pathetic bursts of venom as he watched Russia's wishes ignored despite its so-called "energy superpower"status.

Only days remain before the last election that will matter in Russia for decades to come takes place. We urge the people of Russia to rouse themselves from their horrific slumber before it is too late.

The Moscow Times reports:

Three dark-skinned people have been killed in four days in an apparent outbreak of hate crimes, prompting Moscow police to beef up their presence on the streets and Mayor Yury Luzhkov to appeal for calm.

Police found the body of a 34-year-old native of Kabardino-Balkaria in northwestern Moscow late Sunday, Interfax reported. It was unclear how the unidentified man died. A mobile phone and a wallet with 40,000 rubles were found in his jacket, suggesting that the motive for the attack was not robbery. On Saturday, 10 young people armed with knives attacked two Kyrgyz natives near the Tekstilshchiki metro station in southeastern Moscow, Interfax said. Merlan Eygeshov, 25, died after being stabbed 11 times, while the other, Abdametal Mamydov, 21, was hospitalized and in critical condition, the report said. A Tajik citizen was stabbed to death and a teenage boy was knifed in separate attacks late Thursday.

The Kyrgyz Interior Ministry lodged a complaint Monday about the violence, saying six Kyrgyz citizens have been killed in Russia since Jan. 1. City authorities said they were responding. "We are not talking about specific districts, but rather about a general boost in the number of police officers across the city," a city police spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity. The spokeswoman was unable to provide details, saying only that officers are being expected to patrol more of the city and work longer hours. National media reported that police were focusing their efforts on southeastern Moscow, where attacks have been the most frequent. The spokeswoman said, however, that no district was being afforded special attention. Calls to the Kyrgyz Embassy for comment went unanswered Monday.

Luzhkov, meanwhile, held a meeting Monday with the Moscow representatives of Central Asian countries whose citizens have been attacked with increasing frequency. The results of the meeting were not immediately available. Despite a slight dip in the number of murders in Moscow in 2007, a year-on-year analysis reveals racially motivated killings make up a growing percentage, according to statistics from the Sova Center, which tracks hate crimes. Sova recorded six racially motivated killings in January. Police recorded 1,018 murders in 2005. The Sova Center said 16 of those, or 1.57 percent, were racially motivated. A year later, the figure more than doubled to 37 of 1,191 (3.11 percent) total murders. Last year, 42 of 1,101 killings (3.8 percent) were racially motivated.

Alexander Verkhovsky, Sova's director, dismissed the police's promise to address the issue as a cyclical phenomenon that appears whenever the media have little else to report. "Police officials always try and play down the role of racism in these crimes, though prosecutors are starting to admit what's really going on," he said. In an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda published Monday, Moscow police chief Vladimir Pronin said "there is no organized skinhead movement" in Moscow, referring to ultranationalists typically suspected of attacks on dark-skinned people. "But there are separate groups," he said.

Congressional Quarterly reports:

Almost a year after Kremlin critic Paul Joyal was gunned down in his suburban Maryland driveway, the case remains a mystery. To some, including the Prince George’s County police, it was a random street crime, “an attempt at a citizen robbery,” a spokesman said Friday. The alleged assailants, two black men whom Joyal only glimpsed before he was felled by a single handgun shot in his gut, remain at large. “There’s no change in the status of the case,” said police spokesman Henry Tippett. “We still think it was a citizen robbery.”

Others don’t buy that, starting with a retired P.G. County police detective, Karl Milligan, who spent decades in homicide before retiring as chief of the intelligence unit in 2004. Milligan volunteered to help Joyal, 53, a one-time chief of security for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a former business partner of retired Soviet KGB Gen. Oleg Kalugin, after reading about Joyal’s outspoken criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Only four days before he was attacked, Joyal was featured on an NBC Dateline show accusing the Kremlin of going after its critics abroad. The “citizen robbery” idea never made sense to him, Milligan said, starting with its location, in the quiet Holly Hill neighborhood of Adelphi, a ’50’s-era subdivision with no drive-through traffic, abutting George Washington Memorial Cemetery.

“First of all, it’s way up in a corner of P.G. County, so secluded you’d hardly know anybody lived there,” said Milligan, 51, in an interview last week. “Crime was very low there and still is.” Carjackings, muggings and home invasions are virtually unknown there, the police confirmed. “There were no [violent] incidents prior” to the March 1, 2007, attack, Tippett said, and none since. “It’s still generally a quiet area.”

Another thing, Milligan says: The way the attack went down.

‘That’s Not How Robbers Act’

Joyal was returning home after meeting Kalugin for a drink near the Spy Museum in downtown Washington. The longtime security expert pulled into his driveway and stepped out of his car. Two men jumped from the bushes, one grabbing him from behind. They were both black, Joyal told me over lunch a few weeks ago, but he got only a fleeting look at the one facing him, who had “sandy hair that looked dyed.”

“He says, ‘Shoot him!’” Joyal said, in “some kind of accent, maybe Caribbean.” A handgun went off. A bullet pierced his intestines. He crumpled to the ground, bleeding heavily. The assailants ran off into the night, leaving behind Joyal’s wallet, his computer, his briefcase and, of course, his car. “That is not how a crime is committed up there,” says Milligan.

Joyal’s wife, Elizabeth, emerged from the house, screamed and called an ambulance. Her husband spent the next 20 days in an induced coma and underwent five operations to put his intestines back together. When he woke up, he at first thought it was an ordinary street crime himself. But others immediately suspected the involvement of Russian assassins, who had been on a rampage against critics of the Putin regime.

Joyal, who had been a consultant to former Soviet Georgia as well as companies who wanted to do business in Russia, saw the hand of the Putin regime in the assassination of dissident former Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko, who died from a lethal dose of polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope, in London in November 2006. “A message has been communicated to anyone who wants to speak out against the Kremlin,” Joyal said on NBC Dateline. “If you do, no matter who you are, where you are, we will find you, and we will silence you — in the most horrible way possible.”

Joyal was “silenced,” too, many Russian experts thought. “He had just accused the Russian government on NBC of poisoning former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko in London the previous November,” the prolific journalist Alex Shoumatoff, whose aristocratic parents emigrated from Moscow when the czar was overthrown in 1917, noted.

“Litvinenko had blown the whistle on murders and corruption in the Putin regime. . . . The month before that Anna Politkovskaya, who had written about the torture of Chechens by the Russian army in the biweekly Novaya Gazeta, was gunned down in her Moscow apartment elevator. And two years before that Paul Klebnikov, the Moscow editor of Forbes Russia, was shot dead in the street. Klebnikov had just begun to investigate the 1995 murder of a Russian TV journalist, Vladislav Listyev.”

Shoumatoff also noted the suspicious death of “Ivan Safronov, who fell to his death from his 5th-story window on March 2,” the day after Joyal was attacked. “A military correspondent for the daily Kommersant, Safronov was working on a story about the Kremlin’s furtive sale of anti-aircraft missiles to Iran and jet fighters to Syria.”

Kalugin, who had once commanded all Soviet espionage operations in the U.S. as chief of the KGB’s First Directorate, said that without an arrest, no one could be certain of who was responsible for the attack on Joyal. But he called it “strange.”

“Why were they waiting for him? That’s not how robbers act,” Kalugin said in a telephone interview. “There are dozens of houses in the neighborhood. Why would they pick his? And why would they wait for him in the bushes at the house?” The onetime master spy, a frequent lecturer on Russian activities in the U.S., said he has received “anonymous threats” in letters and telephone calls. But “that was some time ago.” State controlled Russian media, he said, often wonders in print why he hasn’t been killed, in a tone that seems to be “goading the Russian security services” into getting rid of him.

The FBI briefly got involved in the Joyal case, and took a cartridge found at the scene to the crime lab at Quantico, where it sits today. An investigative source who conferred with them said they “didn’t seem to have much interest in it.” The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

The Fate of Beckett

Those who follow events in Russia closely are divided on whether the Kremlin would dare to reach out and touch someone in the United States. For starters, it would demand a response from the Bush administration, which has soft-peddled its criticism of Putin, a former KGB agent himself, in exchange for cooperation against Islamic terrorists and other issues, many critics say.

“If the Russians were behind the attack on Paul Joyal, then they crossed a line that they had not done earlier even in Soviet times — attacking a native-born American citizen on American territory,” says Paul Goble, a longtime U.S. government specialist on Soviet and post-Soviet states who now teaches in Azerbaijan. “One hopes that they would not dare do so, but that there are widespread suspicions on this point reflects two things: the Russian government’s lack of total control over all those in its security structures and the deterioration of conditions in Russia itself more generally.”

But Glen Howard, president of the Jamestown Foundation, established during the Cold War to help promote the views of Soviet defectors in the West, said it’s “absolutely” possible that the Russians may have sanctioned the attack on Joyal. “It’s part of a whole chain of events,” Howard said. Since Putin has been in power, Russian diplomats in Washington have increasingly been exhibiting “thuggish” behavior in response to the foundation’s activity and criticism of Russian policies in Chechnya and rest of the North Cauasus. “They show up in the lobby and demand to see someone,” in contrast to the warm era under Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, when “they would have the civility to call you up an make an appointment.”

Not long ago, Howard said, one Russan diplomat simply showed up at his office and “refused to leave” until security guards were called. Howard also said that Jamestown, and he personally, have been singled out for criticism by the state-owned Russian press. In 2005 the foreign ministry issued a note of protest to the State Department about the activities of The Jamestown Foundation, a research and analysis organization that focuses on Russia and Eurasia. “It creates an air of intimidation,” he said. “It makes me think twice about doing something, not only in Russia, but even Washington. D.C.”

Whether the Kremlin had a hand in Joyal’s attack, said Goble, it’s unlikely to be discovered. Many cut-outs would have been employed to separate Moscow and the thugs who shot him. “Some have speculated that it could be the case that no one in Moscow gave an order to go after Paul Joyal but that someone senior there made a ‘who will rid me of this meddlesome priest’ type of comment, and a more junior person decided to ‘show initiative’ by acting on that hint alone,” Goble said in an e-mail from Azerbaijan. “In some ways, that possibility is even more disturbing than a direct order, because it means that the Russian authorities may not be in a position to ensure that this does not happen again.”

The elimination of critics, said Goble, is part of “the radical deterioration of conditions in the Russian Federation under Putin.”

“Because of that deterioration,” he added, “some who want to go to Russia regularly and maintain close ties with Russian officials have become more cautious, just as some of their predecessors were in Soviet times.”

But other security experts dismiss the likelihood of the Kremlin contracting out an assassination in the United States. The downside overwhelms any small advantage it could gain from silencing a critic here, not to mention the risk of getting caught. Putin has been on a public relations offensive recently, most visibly in buying lavish color inserts in The Washington Post — 10 last year, according to the newspaper, which declined to put a dollar amount on no doubt expensive purchases — touting everything from tourism to Putin’s possible successor to the virtues of his wife. The regime and its closely allied oligarchs also have scores of powerful public relations firms on retainer, say Joyal and others. “I think it’s extremely unlikely that the Russians would attempt to take out a Kremlin critic in the U.S.,” says Eric Rosenbach, a one-time military intelligence officer who was national security adviser to Sen. Chuck Hagel , R-Neb., until recently taking an appointment at Harvard.

A retired CIA operative with many years experience working directly against the Soviet KGB scoffed at the idea, even going so far as to suggest that Joyal, who years ago had a reputation of dramatizing the communist menace in America, of hyping the attack. Joyal, a member of the Capitol Police years ago, conceded that he’d “made some mistakes in my youth.” But he added — accurately — that “the idea that it was them [the Russians] came from other places.”

“I was out of it for 20 days, with a breathing tube up my nose, in the hospital,” he said. “When I gave my report to the police, I thought it was a local crime. Look at the facts,” he added. “There’s been no crime in that neighborhood.” But if there were Russian involvement, he added, there’s no incentive for Washington to publicize it. “Think of the ramifications,” he said, “for the U.S. government.”

LR: Has he written or spoken a single critical word about the Kremlin since the incident?

(1) Another Original LR Translation: Nemtsov on Putin,Volume I

(2) EDITORIAL: Annals of Russian Stupidity

(3) Top 10 Rules of Neo-Soviet Propaganda

(4) Cowardly Putin, Hiding from the Truth

(5) Putin to Stay Forever, Dooming Russia Utterly

(6) Kremlin Inc., Killing Khodorkovsky Mafia Style

(7) All in All, He's Just Another Brick in the Neo-Soviet Wall

NOTE: Today we being serializing our original translation of Boris Nemtsov's white paper reviewing the Putin years. Look for part two in Wednesday's edition.

NOTE: Today is the two-month anniversary of Oleg Kozlovsky's abduction by the Russian government for illegal induction into the armed forces in order to silence his criticism of the regime.

NOTE: We've published another original translation from the Russian press on Publius Pundit, where a heroic Russian journalist takes the Kremlin to task over its rejection of election monitoring.

NOTE: We rip Dmitri Medvedev several new ones in our latest installment on Publius Pundit. Feel free to drop by and put the boot in.

NOTE: A reader recently asked why Robert Amsterdam's video about human rights abuses in prison camps, mentioned by the Wall Street Journal here, was taken off line. Amsterdam answers here.

Putin: The Bottom Line by Boris Nemtsov (pictured) and Vladimir Milov is an excellent exposition of the whole Russia problem, calmly and clearly laying out everything we already know about Russia's problems.

What makes it interesting is that it is a clear-eyed look at the country by one of its own nationals. What a contrast this presents to the usual outpourings of rubbish thinking from benighted Russia. It's a essay every Russian should read and that every Western politician who has to deal with Russia should have in his armoury or be made to read.

I propose to provide readers of LR with a “serialised” translation, i.e. chapter by chapter, and then to produce a unified PDF document whose link will be posted in LR's sidebar for permanent reference. The contents of the report are as follows, preceded by an introduction:

1. Corruption is Corroding Russia

2. The Forgotten Army

3. Oh, the Roads...

4. Russia Dying out

5. The Pension Crisis

6. Basman Courts

7. Flouting the Constitution

8. The Collapse of the "National Projects"

9. Enemies All Around. Except China

10. Worsening Inequality

11. Economic Bubble

Putin: the Bottom Line

by Boris Nemtsov

First Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, 1997-1998

and

Vladimir Milov

Deputy Minister of Energy, 2002

Translated from the Russian by Dave Essel

The eight years of Putin’s rule are coming to an end and the time has come to take a look at the bottom line. Many placed great hopes in Putin’s presidency. Some results have been achieved: official propaganda like to make much of the fact that during the years of his rule (2000-2007), the country’s GNP has gone up by 70%, real incomes have, according to the statistics, have more than doubled and poverty has been reduced with the number of people with incomes below the official subsistence level down from 29% in 2000 to 16% in 2007. The budget has a surplus and the state’s financial prospects higher than ever: in January 2008 Russia’s gold and foreign currency reserves reached 480 billion dollars, third largest in the world after China (which has over 1.5 trillion) and Japan (980 billion). The Russian Stabilisation Fund has grown to 157 billion dollars.

All this is true. But it’s only the lesser part of the truth. There are other results of Putin’s rule which are not covered by the state media. And these are shockers. During the years of Putin’s rule, export prices of oil amounted to an average of $40 per barrel while recently they have been over $60. For comparison: the average prices of oil during the Yeltsin years stood at $16.70. The colossal opportunities opened up by high oil prices should have been used by Putin to modernise the country, carry out economic reforms, create a modern army, and establish public health and pension systems.

None of this was done. The army, the pension system, public health, secondary education, and the road system have all degraded. The economy is not doing well either: a stroke of luck was the main reason it was possible to bring relative order to the financial sphere but it also created bubbles in the share markets and in real estate while investments in the real parts of the economy have risen very cautiously while production capability has not been modernised during this time. The opportunities offered by the oil windfall have been missed. As under Brezhnev, super-income from the export of oil and gas have to a large extent been frittered away and necessary reforms left undone.

As a result, as we reach the end of Putin’s presidency, we once again find ourselves with the stable empty and the door open – without a social security system that works properly, facing a growing deficit in the pension fund, with an army straight out of the last century, with state companies in immense debt, and with a level of corruption completely unprecedented in all of Russia’s history. Furthermore, despite the fact that some oligarchs have been sent into exile or put into prison, the remainder continue to enrich themselves – Russia is looking to lead the world in number of billionaires. The increase in the wealth of some oligarchs – for example, Putin’s friends and Russia’s richest man Roman Abramovich – has come straight from government funds. But it all could have been otherwise.

It all could have been otherwise – Russia could have taken a different road. In the 1990s, we experience the collapse of the communist system, the results of which were far more serious than had been expected. Despite that, however, the economy began to grow before Putin came to the presidency: in 1999 GNP rose by 6.4% and industrial production by 11%.It proved possible to reduce crime in the second half of the 1990s (crime figures began dropping in 1996-1997), mortality rates and falling birth rates, all of whose roots went back to Soviet times (rising crime rates and falling birth rates were first noted in the second half of the 1980s; mortality began rising in the early 1970s).

In 1997, after overcoming the most serious consequences of the collapse of socialism and the completion of the semi-reforms of the early 1990s, the Russian government for the first time set out to make systemic reforms aimed at transforming the country into a modern democratic state with a competitive market economy. The loans-for-shares privatisations were stopped and the government began to take action against the influence of the oligarchs. Oligarchic pressuring and the collapse of the state share pyramids prevented these reforms from being completed.

However, many of the ideas from those days were included in Putin’s “first plan” – the programme for socio-economic reforms mooted in 2000 at the start of Putin’s first term. The main heading of this plan were: building of a law-abiding state and of civilised markets, the lowering of bureaucratic barriers, allowing private investments to contribute to the economy, the development of small and middle business, and the implementation of important social reforms. A number of important steps were taken back then, at the start of Vladimir Putin’s presidency – tax and land reform among them. The passing of the Law on Land Ownership put that issue into gear: land, one of the country’s main resources, ceased to belong to no-one and acquired a legal status and a value. The production of a whole series of systemic legal codes and laws brought us closer to having a law-governed state.

From the very beginning, however, Putin’s government distinguished itself by its authoritarianism in the political arena. Many were outraged by the return to the Soviet national anthem, the disbandment of the independent TV channels NTV, TV6, and TVS, and the virtual dissolution of the Federation Council as an independent organ of the state. On the other hand there were others believed that authoritarian modernisation was a possible way for the state to go and many were ready to forgive the state its authoritarian ways if only the country was put in order. But as Viktor Chernomyrdin’s famous phrase has it: “one had hoped for the best but the result was as always." Authoritarianism triumphed under Putin but no modernisation came about from it.

In 2003, when unprecedented pressure was first deployed against business and the decimation of YUKOS was begun, it became clear that we had taken the wrong track. The the further down it we went, the worse things got: falsified Duma and presidential elections carried out with the crudest of uses of administrative resources in 2003-2004; the unsuccessful interference in the Ukrainian elections; the passage of a whole range of laws restricting freedom of speech, assembly, and the activities of political parties and associations; aggressive foreign policies; and a gradual drawing of the country into confrontation with the rest of the world. Russia became ever more a police state. All the reforms of the early 2000s were made to fail and were replaced instead by greedy redistribution. Corruption became rampant. At the same time, state propaganda, as back in Brezhnev’s days, was endless used to brainwash people. “All is fine, life’s better now, life’s happier” says the propaganda from the Kremlin.

This brochure aims to be a sober and realistic analysis of how our live have changed during the years of Putin’s rule. Someone has already coined this phrase: “Life’s better now… but nastier”. We would like to open the eyes of our fellow-citizens to the sort of Russia that Putin and his successors are making for us.

We would like as many Russians as possible to look the truth in the eyes and recognise what is happening to our country. Let people think about these most serious problems lurking behind the icing of official propaganda and shameless dissimulation. Let them understand that these problems will not just go away: the only thing that’s going away is the time of our oil riches

And these issues will have to be resolved. We do have an alternative to propose. But in order to make this happen, we are going to have to take matters into our own hands. Putin’s and his band of men will not lend a hand: their eight years in power has been long enough to make that clear.

1. Corruption is Corroding Russia

One of the worst and blackest results of Vladimir Putin’s presidency has been Russia’s dive into an unprecedented mire of corruption. We are officially one of the world’s top countries when it comes to theft by civil servants. Russia has dropped to 143rd place in the worldwide rating of perceived corruption issued by Transparency International, making our country one of the most corrupt on earth. Our neighbours on the list are Gambia, Indonesia, Togo, Angola, and Guinea-Bissau. We lag far below such countries as Zambia (123rd), Ukraine (118th), Egypt (105th), Georgia (79th), and South Africa (43rd). Back in 2000, we were rather ‘better” placed at 82nd but we have now reached nearly the bottom. According the the INDEM Foundation [TN: "Information Science for Democracy", Russian NGO founded in 1990] the volume of corrupt business conducted in Russia rose from under $40 billion in 2001 to $300 billion today.^[1](!). Bribes and racketeering by civil servants is ubiquitous.

Putin has proved even more cunning that the oligarchs and other disciples of corruption who parasited off the reforms of the 1990s. There was plenty of corruption in the 1990s, too, but it was open to view – the free press could report on incidents of corruption with hindrance. In 1997, some members of the government were fired for receiving an advance of $90K each for a book about privatisation. Today’s practitioners of corruption laugh at this pathetic sum.

Today theft by civil servants is measured in billions and is hidden from the eyes of the people: large share-owners cover for dozens of secret beneficiaries, “friends of president Putin”, hiding behind their backs. Information on who the real owners are is carefully protected by the secret services and the subject of corruption in the higher echelons of power is taboo for the Kremlin-controlled media.

Meanwhile, bribery and the convergence of the civil service with business has become the norm at all levels of the government – federal, regional, and local. Spouting phrases about the “revenge of the oligarchs”, Russia is witnessing the rapid enrichment of a new and more powerful Putin oligarch – at your expense and mine. Assets are being removed from state ownership and handed over to the control of private people, property is being purchased with state money back from the oligarchs at stunning prices, a friends-of-Putin oil export monopoly is being created, and a Kremlin “black safe” is being funded. This is a brief outline of the criminal system of government that has taken shape under Putin.

The Oscar-winner in the transfer of important assets into the hands of secret third parties is Gazprom. In just three years, without any kind of tender and by means of an opaque procedure, three important assets servicing the company’s cash flow have been transferred to third-party ownership. The first of these was the Gazprom insurance subsidiary Sogaz: in 2005 its ownership was transferred to divisions of Rossiya Bank in Petersburg. At the time of the transfer. Rossiya Bank’s assets were valued at approximately the same as Sogaz’ worth – $1 billion. However, Sogaz was not sold at open auction but simply transferred into the Petersburg bank’s ownership.

In 2006, Rossiya Bank was handed the management of the Gazfond pension funds which amounting to over $6 billion. In late 2006/early 2007, these funds were used to buy out 50% of the shares of Gazprombank, which by late 2007 was second in assets to Sberbank.^[2]

According to the media, Rossiya Bank was set up in 1990 by inter alia the General Manager of the Leningrad District Office of the CPSU, now its chairman, Yuri Kovalchuk, an acquaintance of President Putin’s from his time working in Petersburg. The full list of the bank’s owners is unknown.

One of the largest deals done by Putin’s friends in the Rossiya Bank was the seizure of the giant Gazprom-Media holding, which includes the NTV, TNT, television channels and other media interests. Before Gazprombank fell into the hands of Kovalchuk & Co., in July 2005 Gazprom’s media interests (the Gazprom-Media group and shares in the NTV and TNT televisions channels) were transferred to the bank for a payment of just $166 million^[3]. Two years later, in July 2007, vice premier Dmitri Medvedev estimated the value of Gazprom-Media’s assets as $7.5 billion^[4]. It would appear that Gazprom gave its assets to friends of president Putin for a fraction of their real worth! Compared to this deal, the loans for shares auctions look like exemplars of honesty and transparency.

“Russia – Land of Possibilities”, cynically proclaim Rossiya Bank’s billboards in central St. Petersburg on the Nevsky Prospekt and by St. Isaac’s Cathedral. Folded into the hands of Yuri Kovalchik, these media assets are not just business. They are a full-scale political resource to be used for mass influence of public opinion. In effect, Kuvalchuk controls a gigantic non-government media holding which todays own four television channels (NTV, TNT, REN TV, and Channel5 St. Petersburg), one of the country’s widest circulation newspapers (Komsomolskaya Pravda), and dozens of other small television and radio stations and newspapers.

This whole gigantic media empire – Putin-media – presents serious competition to the state television channels and other media. Its might is beyond comparison with that of the previous influence of Gusinsky and Berezovsky. It is difficult to imagine that this resource is not going to be used to further Putin’s political interests.

Yuri Kovalchuk’s brother Mikhail head the Kurchatov [Atomic Energy] Institute and recently became acting vice-president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. It is he who is to distribute the 130 billion roubles allocated to nanotechnology development. Yuri Kovalchuk’s son Boris, a former adviser to vice-premier Dmitri Medvedev, now head the Russian government’s department of ‘priority national projects”. This department oversees the funds allocated to “national projects”.

Gazprom is not the only structure to have been looted under Putin. In 2004, as a result of a supplementary share issue at SvyazBank, which was set up in the 1990s specially to serve state communications enterprises, over 50% of the shares ended up in the ownership of a company by the name of RTK-Leasing. Following this share issue, companies in the communications business which previously used the services of other banks began to move the accounts to SVyazBank. In early 2005, the Society for the Protection of Consumer Rights addressed a request to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry of the Interior, and the Treasury that review be carried out^[5]. However, nothing much was done.

The owner of RTK-Leasing is said to be Geoffrey Galmond^[6]. His name is frequently linked with that of the Russian Minister of Information Technology and Communications, Leonid Reiman. But who are the real beneficiaries?

This is how under Putin massive assets are removed for state control and land up in the hands of private individuals.

Another historic deal was the buy-out in September 2005 of 75% of the shares of Sibneft from Putin’s friend oligarch Roman Abramovich for $13.7 billion^[7].

The state could easily not have bought Sibneft (at the time of the sale it was the smallest of Russia’s vertically integrated oil companies and had falling production). It could have paid considerably less for it – particularly if one bears in mind that Abramovich originally acquired control of the company for $100 million.

Sibneft, however, was bought for the highest possible, artificially exaggerated^[8], price and half of it, furthermore, was financed directly by the state. In June-July 2005 the state, through a company called RosNefteGaz which was specially set up for the purpose, paid Gazprom $7.2 billion and received 10.7% of Gazprom’s shares in exchange^[9]. These were the same shares that 12 years previously by a decree of president Yeltsin in 1993 to Gazprom had been allocated for purchase by vouchers^[10]. The state could have increased its share in Gazprom for absolutely nothing by using these shares.

Why pay Abramovich over $7 billion from state funds (the rest of the money came for Gazprom’s budget) to increase the state’s shareholding in Gazprom when the authorities to all intents and purposes controlled the company? What can this be called other than diversion of assets?

Why pay $13.7 billion for Sibneft when less could have been paid> And did the payment go to Abramovich? He is said to be the owner of Millhouse, which sold Sibneft to Gazprom. But no-one actually knows the names of the true owners of Millhouse. It is said that Abramovich has an influential partner, co-owner of Millhouse. Who is he?

In fact, why did Sibneft need to be nationalised at all? If it had been bought by private owners, its efficiency would almost certainly not have dropped as it did under Gazprom’s management and the state would not have had to pay all that money for it.

Incidentally, according to Gazprom’s accounts, the company’s and its subsidiaries capitalization in mid 2004 included 17.5% of Gazprom shares. By 30 June 2007 – 0.5%^[11]. In 2005 the state bought back 10.7% of the shares. Where did the other 6.3% of Gazprom shares, today worth nearly $20 billion, go? Who owns them?

Why does Gazprom divvy up hundreds of millions of dollars of yearly profit from transit fees and re-export of Central Asian gas with the co-owners of the Swiss trader RosUkrEnergo? Who is behind this middleman?

All the above deals done by Gazprom were concluded during the time presidential successor to Putin Dmitri Medvedev was chairman of its board of directors. What role did he personally play in all these deals and is his selection as successor perhaps a result of them?

Yet another affair during Putin’s time is the rise and rise of the business of hitherto unknown Swiss oil trading house Gunvor through which about a third of Russia’s oil exports are effected (almost all of Surgutneftegaz’s production, a considerable proportion of Gaspromneft’s, Rosneft’s and others). This company controls oil exports to the tune of not less than $40 billion annually.

When Putin had only just come to power, a state monopoly on Russian oil exports was actively being discussed. This monopoly was to all intents and purposes introduced, but not as a state monopoly but rather a private one. Behind Gunvor stands Gennadi Timchenko, an old comrade of Putin’s from his St. Petersburg days^[12].

In a letter to the British paper The Guardian, another co-owner of Gunvor, Swede Thorburn Tornkvist admitted that the mighty oil trading house does have a “third co-owner”. Who that might be remains unknown.

It is also unclear who owns Surgutneftegaz, Gunvor’s main supplier. It is believed that the company is controlled via a chain of intermediary companies by its current CEO Vladimir Bogdanov. Another version, however, has currency: that back in 2002-2003 Bogdanov sold his shares on to persons unknown, representing the highest echelons of Russian power, that these included Timchenko and possibly also Putin. This still remains to be verified. Other private oil companies (Lukoil, Yukos, TNK-BP) disclosed the names of their true owners a few years ago, but the true structure of Surgutneftegaz’s ownership is still opaque^[13].

Catching Putin and his accomplices red-handed is difficult. They cover their tracks of their dirty business too professionally. Evidently they have learnt from dictator Saddam Hussein, documentary proof of whose corrupt activities the Americans were never able to find even though Saddam and his sons bathed in luxury and had to deny themselves nothing.

On the hand, the Russian authorities can sometimes be caught with their hand in the till. In may 2006, the Zurich Arbitration Court rued that the owners of the Bermudan IPOC Fund, which owns a controlling share of cellphone operator Megafon, plundered money in the interests of the fund’s real beneficiary, the unnamed “Witness #7”. The description of witness #7 fully matches that of Leonid Reiman, Minister of Communications, Petersburger, and long-time comrade of president Putin^[14]. The nominal owner of IPOC is Danish lawyer Geoffrey Galmond, who also owns TelekomInvest, Interregion Tranzittelekom, and 50% of cellphone operator Sky Link. In November 2007, the British Virgin Islands authorities asked the US counterparts help investigate Reiman’s involvement in illegal activities^[15].

But Minister Reiman continues in the nest of health and remains at his post.

There remain too many other unpleasant questions to be asked of Putin and his entourage. Who is the real co-owner of Surgutneftegaz, Megafon, Sky Link, Roman Abramovich's Millhouse, and the powerful oil trader Gunvor? Can it really be that some Danish, Swedish, Finnish, and Chukotsk businessmen have come to own a good half of Russia without sharing with Putin? Where do the colossal sums earned from arms sales by Rosoboronexport’s (headed by Putin’s friend Sergei Chemezov) go? Is it true, as reported in the media, that there is a ‘black safe” in the Kremlin^[16], a system for secretly moving cash from unknown sources which is then used to finance pre-election campaigns or other purposes?

It is hardly surprising that experts and political scientists compete in their attempts to estimate Putin’s personal fortune, putting it at $20, $30 billion. Some say even more.

The authoritarian-criminal régime that has taken shape during the years of Putin’s rule threatens our country’s very future. The authorities have everything to lose. If free media ever arise again in Russia together with competition in politics, the black dealings of today’s rulers in Russia will come to the surface. If that happens, they will at best lose their posts and along with that the way to earn billions on the side. In the worst case, they will lose their freedom. The diversion of state assets, firstly of course those of Gazprom, the use of foreign middlemen to purchase Russian oil at artificially lowered prices (which Mikhail Khodorkovsky is accused of and imprisoned for) has become a widespread and much larger-scale practice amongst the many “friends of Putin”.

We need to put a stop to all this. We need to turn over this shameful page in our history. We need people with clean hands to come to power, people without corruption scandals and unsavoury connections in their pasts. We need to radically reduce the powers of civil servants over the country, to limit their authority, in order to pull the rug out from under the feet of corrupt agents and thieves in positions of power. The state should be shorn of powers that it is unfit to hold over enterprises and and their cash flows. We need to see a rebirth of the practice of open and honest privatisation which began to take place in 1997-2002.

There should be limits on how long senior civil servants can stay in their posts – at all levels: federal, regional, and local. This is needed in oder to prevent people from growing into alliances with entrepreneurs and their successors should have the right to openly investigate their predecessors if needs be. There should be a universal principle: serve 8 years and no ‘extensions’, no sleights of hand to maintain your position (like moving on to become prime minister).

We need laws on lobbying, conflicts of interest, on forbidding civil servants and any connected with them to engage in business. We need to disqualify civil servants found to have engaged in corrupt practices so that they can never again in their lives occupy a civil service post.

We need to reinvigorate our law enforcement system and in particular the part of it investigating corrupt practices. Russia needs an independent Federal Investigation Service in which there is no place for any one affiliated with potential corrupt activities or found to be covering for those accused of serious crimes – for example, during the investigation of the suspects in the smuggling operation run by the Tri Kita furniture company, employees of the Procurator's office and of the Investigation Committee persecuted the investigators in this case.

We need strict public control of the activities of the authorities, a rebirth of freedom of speech, the abolition of censorship on federal television channels, and the establishment of fair conditions for political opposition. There should be open public discussion of such issues as corruption in the government and corrupt civil servants should be found criminally responsible. Journalists should be able to freely investigate corruption scandals.

Independent courts are a vital precondition for the battle against corruption. While the courts remain to all intents and purposes under the control of the executive, there is no way that corruption cases will be looked into objectively or that the guilty will be punished.

The only things that will stop the total looting of Russia are the democratisation of the country, the entry into power of responsible and honest politicians to replace the kleptocracy, the abandonment by Russia of life by the thieves’ code, and a return to the creation of the rule of law.