Source: Garry Kasparov's blog.

The R&F Agency, “established 1989”, claims on its website that it is the oldest immigration consultancy service in post-Soviet Russia. It offers legal and other advice on a whole range of immigration/emigration subjects, from e.g. how to apply for Canadian residence permits to where best in the West to buy housing and businesses.

R&F’s home page goes on to say that “the main thing that distinguishes us from other companies is the asymmetricality of our approach to problem-solving and our non-traditional ways with typical situations.”

And they’re not lying: for the sake of customer-entertainment, the site contains a couple of pages of general interest information. And these stun with their asymmetricality and an approach that is far from the traditional Russian one.

Here, as a teaser for a longer translation from the site that I will be presenting in LR, is what one finds by following one of the less visible links on the site. The site’s authors’ write:

Try typing in any search engine of your choice the words “Russia World Rank [whatever] and you will get this sort of result. Here via Google:

Once again Transparency International has released its independent study of world nations, reviewing each for the presence of social and governmental corruption. Once again, Russia's place on the list has fallen -- from #121 in 2006 to #143 last year. Russia is tied with Gambia and Indonesia, just below Pakistan and Syria, with a woeful score of 2.3 out of a perfect ten. The United States is #20, France is at position #19, Germany is #16 and Britain is #12. These are the nations Russia dares to claim the right to sit with at the G-8 table. Think Russia does better when compared to its neighbors in the former Soviet world? Think again. Russia's current score puts it a pathetic #13 out of 20 countries in Eastern Europe -- Georgia towers above it at #3.

Evaluating the TI scoring at the level of fine detail is actually a bit complicated. While each year more and more countries are found to be less corrupt than Russia, each year more and more countries are studied and the average score of the group, of course, changes. This means that Russia's position compared to the group under study actually hasn't fallen as much as superficially might appear by referencing only the numerical ranking tables, but that doesn't make Russia's performance any less abysmal. Russia under Putin is not remotely close to becoming a civilized nation.

Here are Russia's rankings going back to when Vladimir Putin first took over as president. The fraction is Russia's rank out of the total number of countries surveyed, with the #1 position being the least corrupt nation. In parenthesis is Russia's numerical score that generated its rank, out of a perfect "10" for total lack of corruption, followed by the percentile rank for that score compared to the average of the other nations). Basically, TI considers any score below a "5" indicative of barbarism. All the other G-8 nations mentioned above scored above a "7" and Britain came in with an 8.4 at the top of the group.

Paul Goble reports:

Russians now spend an average of nine minutes a day reading newspapers, a figure that puts them among the lowest in the world and one that suggests they read only headlines and titles, the head of the World Newspaper Association told a Moscow conference earlier this week. Speaking to the annual forum of Russian publishers recently, Timothy Bolding, the general director of that association, said that only ten percent of Russians now read newspapers at all, far lower than in countries like Sweden where as many as 90 percent of the population reads the print media.

A major reason for this low readership, he continued, is that Russians do not trust what they see in the printed media: “Only six percent of Russians trust newspapers, while 70 percent of the population in Russia trusts Putin.” As a result, the number of papers and their print runs continue to decline, unlike in other countries with a similar level of economic development. The total number of copies of newspapers printed in the Russian Federation fell from 8.05 billion in 2006 to 7.8 billion last year, according to the Russian government’s own Federal Agency for the Press and Mass Communications, an institution whose analysts blame the decline on the rise of the Internet and increasing problems with distribution.

Bolding, however, suggested that the problems were broader and deeper. These declines he said “perhaps are connected with the low journalistic quality of [Russian] publications.” Many papers are boring as well, in large measure because the local governments that own and subsidize them do no permit the kind of hard-hitting reporting which could attract more readers.

Not surprisingly, Russian media officials did not take Bolding’s comments lying down. Mikhail Seslavinsky who heads the government’s agency for the press said he was not unhappy about the notion that Turks now spend more time reading newspapers than do residents of the Russian Federation. Indeed, he suggested, the difference speaks in Russia’s favor. “When Nadezhda Krupskaya [the wife of Vladimir Lenin] began the [Soviet] struggle against illiteracy,” he pointed out, “she also said that Soviet citizens read newspapers much more slowly than did the Turks.” Now, the data suggest, he continued, that “Russians read newspapers and journals much more rapidly than the Turks do.”

And as to Bolding’s statement that Russians read newspapers much less than Swedes do, Seslavinsky continued, that is easily explained: Swedish audiences have free access to only four or five television channels, while Russians have such access to 15 to 20, a difference that helps explain why the latter watch more television than the former. But neither Seslavinsky nor any of the other Russian participants challenged Bolding’s fundamental observation that when it comes to newspapers, Russians today are reading far fewer and with far less care than in the past, a development that as he suggested reflects both global trends and specific developments in the Russian marketplace.

The Moscow Times reports:

Propelled by a surge of oil and natural gas wealth, Russia has become the leading anti-democratic force in its region, the U.S.-based democracy watchdog Freedom House said in a report released Monday. Nearly two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the vision of a wider Europe "whole and free" remains unrealized, Freedom House also said in the report. "Over time, we have seen rising oil prices correlate clearly with sharply falling democracy performance, especially in Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan," the group's director of studies, Christopher Walker, said in an interview. "The resource curse is taking root."

As energy prices increased over the past decade, the three former Soviet states based their growth on natural energy resources, the report said. The period was marked by "a concurrent and striking decline in the openness and independence of institutions," the report said. By last year, it became clear that Vladimir Putin's era had ushered in a new elite that grabbed power, Freedom House said.

Experimenting in "authoritarian capitalism," an "Iron Triangle" of state power, industry chiefs and security services is leading a decline in the electoral process and increased control over political opponents and news media, the report said. "Independent voices of consequence have been muzzled and are unable to challenge or moderate the leadership's whims and excesses," according to the report. Courts, the backbone of the legal system, are targeted by dominant power-holders to make sure they cannot provide unbiased and independent justice, Walker said. As for the media, Walker said, influential power-holders "want to make sure their enormous assets and use of them are not scrutinized and not taken away, and that contributes to repression."

The growing authoritarianism is also shaping foreign policy, producing "a more assertive and often belligerent posture by Russia toward its neighbors," the report said. For instance, it said, Russia keeps trying to undercut reform in neighboring Georgia and is applying pressure on Estonia. While yielding the post of president to Dmitry Medvedev, Putin holds the post of prime minister and has assumed leadership of the country's dominant political party. The report said it is not clear how the still-evolving authoritarianism will fare without him directly at the helm.

When he took the oath of office in May, Medvedev pledged "to protect the rights and liberties of every citizen." He also declared that "human rights and freedoms … are deemed of the highest value for our society and they determine the meaning and content of all state activity."

Freedom House has also published a report recently called Worst of the Worst: The World’s Most Repressive Societies 2008. Not surprisingly, Russia appears on their list of 20 nations and territories in that category.

The Moscow News reports:

Selling mortgages to people who can't pay them back turned out to be a bad way of doing business in the long run. But inflated credit rates are nothing compared to the droughts, plagues, floods, forest fires and general death and destruction which may be the long-term effects of companies churning out carbon emissions with no thought to their long-term impact on the environment. This lack of foresight could lead to the most wide-ranging market failure ever according to Lord Nicholas Stern, author of an influential economic report on global warming, who will be speaking at this year's Forum. And while Russia's emissions are lower than Kyoto treaty targets, Russia remains one of the least energy efficient economies in the world. Worse still there is evidence that Russia is bearing the brunt of global climate change.

Stern's review provides an apocalyptic account of the dangers of global warming; asserting that governments and businesses must act now to combat climate change or face devastating economic consequences. The report predicts that a rise of five degrees Celsius in the average global temperature could result in a loss of up to 10 percent of global output while the extreme weather patterns associated with such a rise could cost up to 1 percent of GDP.

This rise could happen within the next few decades according to a recent assessment made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which predicts a warming of about 0.2°C per decade for next two decades. Eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years since records began in 1850.

There is evidence that Russia is already suffering from the changing global climate; the annual number of natural disasters, such as floods and forest fires, in the country has doubled since the mid 1990s leading to an annual loss of between 2 and 4 percent of GDP.

In 2004 the Russian government formally recognized the growing problem of climate change by signing up to the Kyoto treaty, which aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions from industrialized countries to 5.2 percent below what they were in 1990. Russia's current emission levels are well below the quota set for the country under the treaty. However this apparent success disguises the fact that Russia remains the third biggest air in the world polluter after China and the U.S.

The main reason why Russia has been able to keep to emissions targets is because the collapse of the economy in the 1990s led to a massive decline in industry and therefore carbon emissions and the country is only beginning to catch up:

"Russia has 27 percent less emissions than it had in 1990s," Vladimir Chuprov, head of the energy department of Greenpeace, told The Mos­cow News.

"But it is predicted to produce 2.4 billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2025 which means that Russia will not decrease its emissions but just use the quota it received after the collapse of the Soviet Union."

Swamped with natural oil and gas resources, it is understandable why energy efficiency has not been high on the agenda for Russia. But as the country's domestic fuel consumption steadily increases in step with the rise in GDP, action will need to be taken in the Russian energy sector in order to meet both its domestic needs and its export obligations.

Director Jeroen Ketting, director of Lighthouse Energy Investments, a group which carries out energy efficiency, heat and power generation projects in Russia, told The Moscow News:

"Russia uses three to four times more energy per produced dollar of GDP than other industrialized countries, and industrial production and thus energy consumption is increasing. But 50 percent of industrial equipment installed is old and inefficient and the energy infrastructure is deteriorating. Moreover, Russia has a lot of gas and oil reserves but its capacity to produce and to transport oil and gas are limited. With increasing domestic and international demand and with existing export commitments Russia's energy household is stretched to its very limits."

There is a worry that Russia will try to fill this energy shortfall in the same way that China has; by increasing the use of coal in the energy mix. This would come as a blow to environmentalists as burning coal seriously affects both the climate and human health. Just one 150-megawatt coal-fired power plant produces more than one million tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year; the amount that 300,000 cars would produce. The large quantities of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter that these plants produce have also been shown to cause respiratory problems and even premature death.

Russia is currently planning to triple the share of coal in the energy mix so that the amount of coal burnt will grow to between 150 million and 290 million tons of coal per year by 2020. This switch to coal to meet domestic energy demands is expected to boost the Russian economy by 30 percent but could lead to serious problems for the Russian population:

"The new coal-fired power plants will be constructed near consumers, near big cities, and some scientists are forecasting a dramatic growth in extra mortality rates. There is currently no real strategy for avoiding the growth of sulfuric and nitrous pollutants that will be emitted from these plants," said Chuprov.

However, as Europe has demonstrated, there is a way for economic growth to go hand in hand with a decline in greenhouse emissions if significant energy saving policies are introduced. CO2 emissions in Central Europe fell by over 43 percent in relation to GDP between 1990 and 2002 through implementing such measures, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The Russian government has calculated that the country could save up to 40 percent of its current annual energy consumption through improved efficiency.

Converting to energy efficient technology can be costly but fortunately Russia can receive financial help to cover these costs under the Kyoto agreement. This allows countries to lower the costs of meeting their own emissions targets by investing in greenhouse gas reductions in other countries where reductions are cheaper through Joint Implementation (J.I.) projects.

Russia has the largest potential for generating carbon credits through of all Kyoto signatories, according to IFC international, a company which provides energy consulting to governments.

"In principle the potential for J.I. projects in Russia is huge," explained Morten Prehn, Director of Core Car­bon Group which currently leads the supply of Russian emission reductions to the international market.

"We support the type of investments that have good long-term benefits for Russia and we are also willing to take a risk in providing the capital for implementing some of these projects," said Prehn.

Several J.I. projects are already successfully underway in Russia including a project supported by the Russian Carbon Fund (an investment company backed by Merrill Lynch & Co.) to cut greenhouse-gas emissions at a plant owned by Russia's biggest producer of phosphate fertilizer. But according to the Stern report one percent of GDP needs to be invested annually in order to avoid the worst effects of climate change and so far Russia is still a long way from reaching this figure:

"Formally the government recognizes the need for enhancing energy efficiency but in practice very little effective action is undertaken," Ketting said.

"Also among big business the need for energy efficiency is not sufficiently recognized. In a country where money is easily made selling off national assets on the cheap the understanding that a ruble saved is a ruble earned is still far away."

The Moscow Times reports more proof that Vladimir Putin is giving Russia the worst of all possible worlds: he strips away all their freedoms, but doesn't give them the peace and order that should go along with it.

Russia is one of the least peaceful places in the world, according to a new study, which ranks it among countries mired in drug trafficking, guerilla wars and political instability.

Russia took 131st place out of 140 countries on the Global Peace Index, just below Colombia and above Lebanon, says the study, released late Monday. Iceland was named the most peaceful country, while Iraq came in last.

Several Moscow-based defense analysts questioned the objectivity of the study.

Russia scored low because of its high military spending, booming arms sales and poor relations with its neighbors, says the study, the brainchild of Steve Killelea, an Australian philanthropist and entrepreneur.

Also hitting Russia's ranking were "high scores for homicides, jailed population, distrust among citizens, violent crime" and a lack of respect for human rights, it said.

The study, which uses 24 criteria, was prepared by Killelea's Institute of Economics and Peace and the Economist Intelligence Unit.

While the study noted "increased stability in Chechnya," it pointed to Russia's "moderately tense" relations with its neighbors and extremely high arms exports.

"I am sure it's quite possible for Russia to improve," Killelea said by telephone from London, noting that Russia's ranking had improved a notch from last year, when the country ranked 118th out of 121 countries in the first-ever study.

Of the other global "military-diplomatic powers," two others also received poor marks, with the United States ranked at 97th and China at 67th, the report said. While European Union members each received a separate ranking, the EU collectively was ranked fourth, tying with New Zealand. Killelea said the poor U.S. ranking had caused "a lot of controversy" in the United States.

Defense analysts took issue with the study's conclusions. "There exists a huge number of misconceptions about Russia and other countries, and they are reflected here," said Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, a think tank that tracks security challenges and Russia's arms trade. "There is no doubt that this ranking reflects an Anglo-Saxon outlook on things."

Pukhov rejected a study conclusion that small arms are easily accessible in Russia. "In the United States, these weapons are available like diapers in a supermarket," said Pukhov, who sits on the Defense Ministry's public advisory board. "Here, it's very hard to obtain arms."

Alexander Khramchikhin, a senior researcher at the Institute for Political and Military Analysis, said the methodology of these kind of studies baffled him.

"This has nothing to do with science," he said. "It has to do with ideology."

Russia tends to rank poorly in similar international studies, including in democracy, transparency, the environment and media freedom, to name a few.

Russian government officials have repeatedly complained that the studies are biased against Russia and do not reflect reality.

Russia's ties with its former Soviet neighbors have grown more strained in recent years, and the country has showed off its increased military might. During the Victory Day parade on May 9, tanks and nuclear-missile launchers rumbled over Red Square for the first time since the Soviet collapse, triggering suggestions of Russian saber-rattling.

Killelea rejected any accusation of bias in the latest report, saying the authors had used independent data and methodology.

He added that he had never visited Russia but that it was among the countries he hoped to see one day.

Paul Goble reports:

Moscow officials were quick to grasp at a recent report that suggested Russians were not consuming as put alcohol per capita as many European countries, but a new examination of the data shows that the amount and kinds of alcohol Russians consume and the way they consume it means that they have the highest rate of alcohol-related deaths in the world. In advance of the release of an international investigation of alcohol consumption in the Russian Federation, Dar’ya Khalturina, a senior Moscow specialist on alcohol consumption, told Gazeta that high levels of alcohol consumption and binge drinking among Russians entail tragic consequences for that society.

The notion, frequently put about by Russian officials and journalists, that foreign experts are “intentionally” trying to make the situation in Russia look worse is something “to put it mildly that does not correspond to reality, Khalturina said. Russians consume an enormous amount of alcohol, and they do so in ways that maximize its negative consequences. According to the Russian government, Russian adults consume 10 liters of pure alcohol from all sources a year, but in fact, they consume at least 15 liters with men consuming far more than women. The first figure puts Russia in the top 50 of all countries, but the second puts it in the top five and possibly higher still, the Moscow scholar said. These figures alone go a long way to explaining the fact that alcohol was directly responsible for 25,000 premature deaths last year (down from 38,000 in 2004) and indirectly responsible for many others. Even the first figure means that Russia has the highest mortality rate from alcohol in the world.

But the impact of the amount Russians consume is exacerbated by the way they consume it. Russians tend to drink to get drunk, a pattern that not only boosts deaths from a wide variety of illness but increases accidents and crime while significantly cutting the birthrate – all matters of a concern in a country now obsessed with its demographic decline. Just how large an impact cutting alcohol consumption can have, Khalturina said, can be seen in an examination of Mikhail Gorbachev’s hated anti-alcohol campaign. That effort increased life expectancy among Russian men by five years to the highest point in history. And it led to an immediate upsurge in the birthrate, the echo of which Russians are seeing today. Unfortunately, she continued, “politically this campaign did not succeed.” It was imposed too quickly and too brutally, something that guaranteed that it would not last. And “even know sociologists do not know what would have been the situation in the country if the anti-alcohol campaign had lasted not three years [as it did] but for example eight years." In fact, she said, “it is possible that if the leadership of the country had carried out this program to its logical conclusion, we would not have an entirely different society.” Thus, “the lesson of the Gorbachev reform is that it is necessary to reduce the consumption of alcoholic drinks in Russia, but it must be done more smoothly and with not so radical methods.

The government must adopt new policies, she argued, because it cannot count on rising incomes to solve the problem as many now think. Alcohol consumption is linked not so much to incomes as to education: Those whose incomes rise will consume more or better quality alcohol; only those with more education will drink less. Among the measures Khalturina recommends for consideration are: higher taxes on alcoholic drinks so that a bottle of vodka will cost eight to ten times that of less strong drinks. Vodka should be something, she says “which a man can permit himself to consume but not every day.” Moreover, the government should restrict the sale of alcohol at night, increase the struggle against the production and sale of illegal alcohol, combat the sale of alcohol to minors (Only one of every eight who tries to buy alcohol is refused, she said.), and launch a propaganda effort against drinking in general and binge drinking in particular. And Khalturina continued, the government should explore cutting the amount of alcohol in medications, introducing a state monopoly on the production and sale of alcoholic beverages and improving the cure rate for alcoholics, given that one in ten of adult Russian men can now be classified as a victim of that disease.

Given the impact of alcohol on Russia’s demographic situation, the Moscow expert said, all these and others as well should be considered and tried out. Unfortunately, she continued, in Russia today, as a result of changes in the 1990s, the alcohol lobby is “very strong” while the anti-alcohol movement remains relatively weak. Nonetheless, the facts are on its side, something Russia’s rulers must recognize is they are to find a way out of the demographic dead end their country is now in.

In yet another horrifying attempt to rewrite and sanitize Russian history, the KGB is now seeking a do-over on the Hitler-Stalin pact that stabbed the West in the back. Soon, for Russians, no such thing will ever have occurred. Paul Goble reports:

The Federal Security Service (FSB) is working with Russian historians trained in Soviet times to rehabilitate the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, not only by selectively releasing hitherto classified documents but also by directly appealing to the Duma to overturn the denunciation of that pact by the Soviet Congress of Peoples’ Deputies in 1989.

On April 22, the FSB hosted a roundtable on “Problems of the Publication of Sources about the Great Fatherland War. Criticism of Attempts at the Falsification of History.” Immediately after the meeting, the FSB put out an anodyne press release about the session, but now more details about what took place are coming to light. Colonel Sergei Ignatenko, the head of the FSB’s Center for Public Affairs, told the meeting, which included archivists, historians and representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church, that the FSB wants to release any document it has “if this does not involve a state secret." The reason for that, he said, is the increasing tendency by Russian and foreign historians, novelists, and filmmakers to “falsify” the history of the second world war and the Soviet Union’s role in it. “That which we see on movie screens today,” he continued, “is to a great extent falsification in a pure form.”

“With rare exceptions,” there are no serious historical investigations of this subject. One reason for that is the efforts of “our Western opponents” who “distribute money” in order to denigrate Russia, its people and its history. But yet another is the impact of the market economy on domestic filmmakers and writers. Ignatenko said that when he asked Russian filmmakers why they were distorting the history of the war, he said that they responded by saying that they were doing so “in order to increase ratings.” They do not think, he said, how harmful this is, but only “about ratings and high pay.”

“We beyond any doubt must be responsible for what we bring to the masses,” the FSB colonel said.

Another speaker, Vasiliy Khristoforov, the chief of the registration administration and archives of the FSB, said that many have written that archives, after having been opened in the early 1990s, were now being closed, but “this is not so and any investigator has the opportunity to work in Russian archives.” But it was a third speaker at the meeting who provided the clearest indication of why the session occurred and what both Soviet-trained historians and the Russian security service hope to achieve in this area. Oleg Rzheshevskiy, a senior scholar at the Academy of Sciences Institute of General History and the president of the Russian Association of Historians of the Second World War, called for the Russian parliament to overturn the 1989 condemnation of the so-called “secret protocol” of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. “When this protocol was condemned,” he said, “did anyone think about the fact that this agreement was concluded in the interests of security? Because no one raised the question about the circumstances in which it was concluded,” circumstances which gave the USSR “no other way out.” Consequently, he continued, “if the parliament of Russia will reverse this decision,” that step alone will permit a more effective struggle with the falsifiers of history.” Because then it will be seen that Stalin’s decision in this case was “perhaps the only possible decision” that a responsible leader could have taken. (In an aside, Rzheshevskiy said that he “does not have official data, however it is precisely known that in Chechnya alone at the time [of the second world war] there were 18,000 armed fighters who struggled against the Red Army,” actions that would have led to “a Civil War” if they had not been deported as Stalin later did.)

Rzheshevskiy concluded his remarks to the FSB meeting by acknowledging that “our history is very complicated but at the same time we must always remember that the USSR defeated fascism,” a contribution that he suggested puts everything else that happened in those times in the proper perspective.

Now, in an essay posted on the Grani.ru portal, Moscow historian and commentator Irina Pavlova has put this meeting and Rzheshevskiy’s remarks in context. She argues that it constituted the long-awaited “revenge” of Soviet-era historians on those who spoke the truth about Stalin in the late 1980s and early 1990s. And tragically, in the current political climate, there is every reason for them to think that “victory will be theirs.” These historians “preserve all the posts in Russian historical science and they also control the preparation of new cadres” in history. Consequently, they are likely to cast their shadow far into the future. These historians have as their credo the programmatic document adopted at the time of a 1997 meeting of the association of historians that Rzheshevskiy heads. They argued then that “history is a political science” and that in writing it, historians must “always think about the interests of their state and be concerned about the healthy though of the [rising] generations.”

In her current article, Pavlova cites what she said at the time about that attitude: “The processes which are taking place in post-Soviet historical scholarship are connected with the general political processes in the country,” processes which are defeating efforts to tell the truth about the past. And what is especially unfortunate, she wrote at that time, is that Western historians are helping these survivals of the Soviet past. “Western historians not only formally continue to maintain ties with pro-communists historians but even support them conceptually,” leaving Russian historians “of the democratic direction” out in the cold. Some of them for reasons of career or otherwise are thus forced to make their peace with their earlier opponents, Pavlova writes today. One example of that is to be found in the evolution of perhaps the greatest Russian specialist on the history of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact itself, Tatyana Bushuyeva.

In the November 1994 issue of “Noviy mir,” Bushuyeva produced the first honest account in the Russian media of the pact and how it opened the way for World War II. Indeed, Pavlova writes, that article was for historians what the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in 1962 was for the Russian intelligentsia more generally. But now, Bushuyeva not only appeared at this FSB meeting but said that “in the 1990s there appeared attempts at the falsification of history, including by means of the invention of facts, the fabrication of documents, and so on.” For herself, Pavlova said, “this sounded like the [notorious] repentance of Dmitry Dudko.” Nonetheless, the Grani.ru writer ended on a hopeful note. “The current powers that be,” she said, can give directions and the historians who serve them can write about the Second World War however they like. They can lie as much as they want, praising Stalin and his policies to the skies, and slandering again as much as possible those” who don’t agree. “But the truth about the war, which at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s began to emerge out from under the rubble, can’t be pushed back. It lives. And the greater the effort to impose the pro-Stalinist conception on society, the more people will be drawn [not to it but] to the truth.”

The Russian Army has a suicide rate of 20.4 per 100,000 soldiers. By contrast, in the U.S. the rate is 11.1 -- in other words, nearly twice as many Russian soldiers kill themselves compared to Americans based on the Kremlin's own data, which is undoubtedly a gross understatement of the Russian total. The Herald Sun reports:

The Russian army loses more soldiers to suicide than any other major armed force in the world, a leaked government document shows. Four hundred and forty two soldiers died in non-combat situations in 2007, the Gazeta newspaper reported today, citing an internal defence ministry document. Two hundred and twenty four of the non-combat deaths were suicides among draftees. By comparison, 155 committed suicide in the US army in 2006, the paper reported. The Russian army has around 1.1 million soldiers compared to 1.4 million in the US army. The Russian army has a reputation for hazing. One human rights group estimated that half of the suicides in the army were due to brutal bullying by older soldiers. In one violent incident, Andrei Sychyov, 19, had to have his legs and genitals amputated after being beaten in 2005 by other soldiers in his barracks in the Ural mountains. Injuries are also common, the paper reported. In January alone, 1500 soldiers were seriously wounded in non-combat accidents. Twenty four thousand soldiers suffered serious wounds in 2007, the paper reported. Accidents listed in the document include road accidents, mishandling of firearms and arguments between soldiers.

The Globe & Mail reports:

College student Renat Nasipov doesn't have time to go to class. He works full time driving a moving van to pay his tuition bills and support his single mother. When exam time came in January, Mr. Nasipov, 21, knew he would fail. Instead, he paid his course supervisor nearly $900 in exchange for passing grades on all of his exams. If all goes to plan, Mr. Nasipov will graduate this June, without ever having attended a seminar or lecture. "I pay bribes for all my exams," said Mr. Nasipov, who is finishing an automotive mechanics course at a small college. "I can't afford to attend class because I have to pay for my education, which is $1,200 a year, and I have to feed myself and my mother."

Mr. Nasipov doesn't feel guilty that his college diploma will be purchased, not earned. His life circumstances left him no other choice, he said. Besides, he doesn't think he missed much by skipping classes. He plans to open an automotive repair business after graduation. "I already drive a car. I know how it all works. I don't need to study mathematics for that."

Mr. Nasipov's story wouldn't shock fellow Russians. While not every student is purchasing a postsecondary education, most adult Russians have, at some point in their lives, slipped money to a public official in exchange for a favour or exemption from a rule. Russians pay bribes to avoid passport-renewal lineups, to obtain driver's licences, to get their kids into top universities or keep them out of the dreaded army.

Corruption is so widespread in Russia today that some activists say the word "corruption" itself is misleading because it implies that there is an aberration of standards. In a recent poll, only a third of Russians said they believe corruption can be rooted out. The country's top leaders admit corruption is tearing at Russia's economy and threatening its economic development. Most of the talk in policy circles concerns the toll that corruption has wrought on struggling small- and medium-sized business, where it's estimated to cost between $1,800 and $41,000 in bribes to start a new company.

But it's not just the Russian economy that is affected. Countless college and university graduates, including medical students, have entered demanding professions using bogus educational credentials. And public safety is jeopardized by motorists who have purchased their driver's licences or paid off inspectors during annual auto safety inspections. Salesman Mikhail Balashov paid $700 for his driver's licence after failing the test four times. Mr. Balashov said he suspected the driving inspector was failing him on purpose because he hadn't offered a bribe. After his fourth failed test, Mr. Balashov arranged to pay the inspector through a mutual acquaintance. On his fifth attempt, after the inspector was paid, Mr. Balashov passed his exam. Like Mr. Nasipov, Mr. Balashov said he felt no remorse. "In this country, you can't survive without giving a bribe. It is just the law of living, not a crime." A few weeks later, he paid a safety inspector $150 to give his car the green light. He said he didn't have time to stand in the day-long queue.

Georgy Satarov, the founder of the Moscow think tank INDEM, which has published numerous reports on corruption, said most Russians don't think of the long-term, broader consequences of state-sanctioned cheating. Few equate Russia's high car-accident death rate with rampant corruption in the motor vehicle sector, he said. "The people who will heal us, the people who will build our bridges; if their diplomas aren't real, it's creating a dangerous situation," Mr. Satarov said. Elena Panfilova, director of the Russian branch of Transparency International, agreed. "Unfortunately, people in Russia still don't understand why it's bad to pay a bribe to a public official," Ms. Panfilova said.

So far, corruption has not deterred short-term investors in high-tech sectors, Ms. Panfilova said. But there is a concern that Russia's endemic corruption could scare off long-term investors who might be considering large capital investments. And the problem is getting worse. Last year, Transparency International ranked Russia 141 out of 180 countries in a ranking of corruption perceptions, a drop of 20 places from 2006. In 2002, Russia placed 71st. Earlier this week, President Vladimir Putin suggested chopping off the hands of corrupt public officials. The President didn't mean this literally, but his comments reflected how serious the issue has become.

His successor, president-elect Dmitry Medvedev, has vowed to tackle the problem anew and has promised to introduce an anti-corruption bill. Many aren't holding their breath. Ms. Panfilova and Mr. Saratov said Russian leaders have been promising for years to crack down on corruption. Despite signing two international treaties aimed at curbing corruption, Russia still has few laws in its criminal code that address the crime, she said. While corruption exists to some extent in every society, the Russian brand began to flourish in the legal vacuum that was left after communism collapsed in 1991 and Russia turned to a market economy.

Over the past few years, the government has introduced a raft of anti-corruption measures, but many initiatives have failed. Mr. Saratov blamed the top-down regime structure created by Mr. Putin, who also doubled the size of the bureaucracy. At the same time, the President stifled the organizations that traditionally scrutinize public officials, namely the media and opposition groups. "It's a dictatorship of the bureaucracy," Mr. Saratov said. Ms. Panfilova said Russian citizens need to be more aggressive about their rights when confronted with corrupt officials. "There is no public control over public servants, she said. "There is no obligation for civil servants to reply to a citizen who has a complaint."

Eventually, corruption could blunt Russia's long-term economic recovery, Mr. Saratov said. Small- and medium-sized business operators feel increasingly strangled by the ever-changing demands of public officials. Ask Alla Abushayeva, who operates two small grocery outlets in Samara, about 850 kilometres southeast of Moscow. Each month, she pays her local tax inspector $125 to keep other municipal officials and inspectors at bay. Ms. Abushayeva said most fines for regulation breaches are set so high - $1,200 for failing to hand a customer a receipt - that business owners must pay bribes to get exemptions.

"If I had been paying all the fines that the tax inspectors and police imposed, I would have been bankrupt a long time ago," she said.

The Moscow Times reports:

Surly babushkas. Sky-high prices. Hotels that claim to have only pricey deluxe suites available when many of the rooms are obviously empty. These are some of the complaints that foreign visitors to Moscow have posted on the web site TripAdvisor, which released a survey this week calling the Russian capital the third-unfriendliest city in Europe.

Moscow ranked third in a list of "European Cities with the Most Unfriendly Hosts" according to the more than 1,400 travelers from around the world queried by TripAdvisor, a portal that calls itself the world's largest online travel community, with more than 25 million visitors per month. The rudest locals live in Paris, while the second-rudest live in London, according to the survey. The survey results, released this week, ranked the top European cities in a broad range of categories, including the best bargain (Prague), the most expensive (London), the dirtiest (also London) and the most boring (Brussels).

Moscow only came up in one category: the most unfriendly hosts.

Dmitry Shultsev, a spokesman for the city government's tourism committee, denied that Moscow was an unfriendly place and suggested that the report was deliberately biased in order to scare away potential visitors. "We do not agree with this," Shultsev said by telephone Thursday. "Every year Moscow is becoming more comfortable, more interesting, cozier and more attractive for our guests from abroad." Similar reports have appeared in the international media just before the start of every tourist season for the past five years, Shultsev said. "They do everything possible to keep Russia down and to depict it in a negative light in order to reduce the flow of foreigners in Moscow," he said.

A London-based spokesman for TripAdvisor called the allegation "ridiculous" and insisted that the report was simply based on travelers' answers. "The survey also has London as the dirtiest and most expensive," Ian Rumgay said. "So is that a plot to dissuade people from going to London?" Rumgay said he could not think of a previous occasion when local tourism officials had responded critically to a negative result in a TripAdvisor survey.

The rankings were based on answers by users who had agreed to participate in the survey, said Rumgay, who provided data that suggested Russian tourism officials did not have that much to worry about. The rankings were determined by travelers' responses to the question "What European city's locals do you think are the most unfriendly hosts?" Given a list of cities, 40 percent chose Paris, 8 percent chose London and only 7 percent chose Moscow, Rumgay said. "So despite coming in third, Moscow in reality did not fare that badly," he said.

Rumgay could not say how many of the 1,400 survey respondents had actually been to Moscow. He conceded that London and Paris may have been popular responses because they are heavily visited cities. In previous TripAdvisor surveys, Moscow's name did not come up at all, Rumgay said, suggesting that may reflect the growing number of foreigners visiting Russia. TripAdvisor maintains a database of reviews written by travelers who offer opinions about hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions around the world. The Moscow section of the web site contains testimony about the quality of service on offer at various hotels and words of caution to future travelers. Some reviews are horror stories with scathing titles such as "Beware the Babushkas!" Shultsev, however, insisted that Moscow hotel staff were well-trained and denied that they were rude to foreign guests. "Such things never happen in Moscow's leading hotels," he said. "It might be possible that in certain second- and third-tier hotels the level of service is not high enough because of repairs or renovation. But to suggest that someone would insult or offend a foreign guest -- this is something I will never agree with."

Foreign visitors provided more critical accounts when told about the survey results in central Moscow on Thursday. "It took two hours for the hotel to find our reservations, and the whole time we were just sitting on our baggage in the hallway," Julia Feld, a tourist from Luxembourg, said while standing near the Kremlin. "But they were very friendly about it," her companion, Norbert Tewner, quickly interjected. Sitting on a sofa in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, German tourist Elizabeth Forsting, 44, expressed frustration about an attempt to get directions. "In London, if you stop someone on the street, they'll help you," she said. "Here, when I showed people a map, they wouldn't help me at all. I asked five different people for help, and they were all very unfriendly."

Forsting, who has previously visited countries like Thailand and Mexico, said her problems did not just stem from the language barrier. "I've been many other places where they don't speak English," she said. "But here they won't even try to help you by hand gestures or whatever." Forsting's anecdote echoed the results of a June 2006 survey that called Moscow one of the least polite cities in the world. In the survey, Reader's Digest magazine ranked Moscow 31st out of 36 cities after sending reporters to assess the politeness of locals by carrying out various tests, such as seeing whether store clerks said "thank you" after a purchase or noting how often people held doors open for them. The magazine found that Moscow and Bucharest were the rudest cities in Europe.

Not all the foreigners interviewed Thursday agreed that Muscovites were bad hosts. "If that's true, we certainly haven't felt it," said Martino, a 35-year-old French backpacker who declined to give her last name. Luciano Rossi, a member of the Italian parliament who was on an official visit to Moscow, defended Russian hospitality when asked for comment on Red Square. "I suggest that people respect the style of Russia," he said. "I myself am not a big fan of the kind of globalization that says that everything has to be the same."

The number of foreign tourists in Moscow reached 4.1 million in 2007, up 7.5 percent from the previous year, according to the city government's tourism committee. In 1999, there were less than 1.5 million tourists. One tourism expert agreed that the infrastructure supporting tourism in Moscow had improved tremendously in the past 10 years. Still, the city has a long way to go before it will be on par with major European capitals, said Helene Lloyd, director of TMI, a marketing and public relations company that studies the tourism sector. "I think the problem is that tourism is still not really considered an important sector for Russia," Lloyd said. "Until that happens, things are obviously going to go very slowly."

The Economist devotes it's most recent issue to "the trouble with Russia's economy." It includes a long feature on the "smoke and mirrors" Potemkin Village created by proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin, as well as the following leader reviewing the "election":

Most elections have an element of uncertainty about them. Not Russia's. This weekend, barring a miracle, Dmitry Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's handpicked successor, will win the Russian presidency by a landslide. The emasculation of the country's fragile democracy—from the Kremlin's monopoly over television to the crushing of any serious opposition candidates—is enough to ensure that. But so is Mr Putin's popularity: he enjoys an approval rating above 70%.

This figure is artificially exaggerated, as is to be expected in a country with no democratic tradition, almost no free media and no independent power centres. But there is little reason to doubt that many, perhaps most, Russians are satisfied with Mr Putin's apparently successful eight years in office and willing to accept his choice of Mr Medvedev. Yet Mr Medvedev's chances of maintaining this level of satisfaction seem remote.

Mr Putin's reputation rests on four chief claims advanced by his supporters, both at home and abroad. The first is that he brought political stability after the chaos of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Second, he imposed peace in Chechnya and across the north Caucasus. Third, he restored Russia's rightful position as an influential world power. Fourth (and most important), he presided over sustained rapid economic growth and a sharp rise in Russians' living standards.

Yet a closer look reveals big flaws in all these claims. Russia's purported political stability rests on a perversion of the normal meaning of democracy and an excessive concentration of power in the Kremlin that has wiped out regional autonomy and fostered corruption, thought by businessmen to be worse now than in the Yeltsin years. The so-called peace in Chechnya has been won by handing control of the republic to a former rebel, Ramzan Kadyrov; the rest of the north Caucasus is more troubled than ever (see article).

As for rising influence and higher living standards, both depend critically on the economy, which Mr Putin touts as his proudest achievement. Average annual growth rates for GDP of 7%, and for real wages in double digits, are certainly impressive at first blush. And it is true that, from early in his presidency, Mr Putin did much to restore macroeconomic stability through fiscal and monetary discipline and the appointment of liberals to the main economic posts—though, given Russia's debt at the time, he had little alternative. Even so, during the Putin presidency growth has been lower than in most other ex-Soviet countries. Moreover, it has relied heavily on surging commodity prices, especially for oil and gas (see article).

Russia's consumption splurge has, in short, been driven by a natural-resource boom. The competitiveness of the non-oil economy has eroded sharply since the devaluation of 1998. The concept of manufacturing for export scarcely exists, outside the arms industry. By the end of his first term, Mr Putin had abandoned most of his tentative attempts at economic liberalisation. Worse, the long-drawn-out Yukos affair, which began in mid-2003, presaged not only an assault on property rights and the rule of law but also a resurgence of state control over, and interference in, the economy. Russia's own history offers powerful testimony of the harmful effects that state intervention tends to wreak.

Even macroeconomic stability, the final legacy from Mr Putin, is under threat. Inflation has already crept up to double figures. It could rise further if the government gives way to growing pressure to spend more from the stabilisation fund, which has so far acted as a useful absorber of oil-and-gas revenues. The trade balance is deteriorating as imports boom. A weakening world economy will not only soften demand for primary commodities, but may even lead their giddy prices to fall.

A grim inheritance, Dmitry

In retrospect, Mr Putin was lucky to inherit a recovering economy and an incipient oil- and commodity-price boom from Mr Yeltsin. Mr Medvedev is in a much worse predicament. He will find it far harder than Mr Putin did to do his job as president at the same time as retaining the support of ordinary Russians. He will take over weakened institutions and a cash pile that promises nothing but headaches as people fight to spend it. The economy is simultaneously overheating and facing the threat of imminent global slowdown.

Mr Medvedev is a canny lawyer who owes his political career entirely to Mr Putin, for whom he worked in St Petersburg in the early 1990s (see article). He comes with two points in his favour: unlike Mr Putin and most other cronies in the Kremlin, he has no background in the security services, not least because he is too young (just 42) to have worked for them in Soviet times; and, as he has confirmed in two recent speeches, his instincts are to favour liberalisation and a reining-in of the state's role in the economy. Unfortunately, his failure to reform Russia's gas monopoly, Gazprom, when he was its chairman, offers less reason for hope.

Worse, Mr Putin will probably still be around as prime minister (he stood down as president only because the constitution sets a limit of two consecutive terms). Nobody can predict exactly how this duo will work, although Mr Putin has made it clear that he intends to be highly active, not least in foreign and defence policy. For his part, Mr Medvedev has promised to stick to the “successful” policies of his predecessor.

In some countries, a division of power might be welcome, not least to avert the risk of too much accruing to one man. But in Russia, where the notion of a tsar survived the Soviet Union, divided power is usually problematic. Maybe Mr Putin will slowly fade out, building up Mr Medvedev as a strong successor. More likely, either Mr Medvedev will be a figurehead atop a strong Putin government, perhaps an interim leader before Mr Putin returns as president; or he (and those around him) will set about using the president's immense powers to try to sap Mr Putin's strength. Either way, a double-headed government promises to be a source of extra instability. At a time when the challenges for the next president are harder than ever, that is the last thing Russia needs.