Paul Goble reports:

Because of an unusual combination of circumstances, Chechens could easily make up one-third of young Russian citizens to be drafted this fall, a figure that means non-Russians would easily form more than 50 percent of that draft class and one that is certain to disturb Russian commanders and politicians, according to a Moscow military analyst. In an extensive article in the current issue of “NG-Regiony,” Vladimir Mukhin calls into question official claims that the just-completed spring draft cycle was successfully fulfilled and points to even greater troubles ahead this fall in complecting the Russian Federation’s armed services. It is true, Mukhin says, that the military was able to draft the 133,200 young people in the plan and that 21.5 percent of them had higher educations, double the figure from a year earlier. It reduced the number of evaders to 6700, a quarter the rate one year earlier. But the military was able to do that only by drafting individuals whose health is at the very least questionable.

Human rights groups like the Soldiers’ Mothers committees believe that as many as half of those drafted should not have been because of poor health, and even the General Staff announced this time around that 30 percent of those it was calling to the colors should not have been. But the prospects Moscow faces this fall are even more problematic, Mukhin continued. On the one hand, the services will have to draft 200,000 young people all at once, 180 percent of the number drafted this spring, and on the other, it will have to fill simultaneously two classes who will be leaving service at the same time because of changes in the length of service required. Indeed, Mukhin argued, “such a large influx into the army as is scheduled to occur this fall has not happened before in post-Soviet Russia to their more senior commanders and the media, about whether they will be able to cope.

In this situation, Mukhin says, “it is not excluded that in order to fulfill draft quotas for the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and other Russian forces, the military commissariats will begin to draft young people from Chechnya,” a step they have not taken in recent times because of the troubles there but which could generate about 70,000 draftees this fall. Because Chechens are “more healthy and accustomed to the military way of life than are young people from other regions,” few of them would be excluded under the new and more relaxed health grounds. And if Moscow does decided to take this step, Mukhin writes, then this fall “every third new draftee could be a Chechen.” Mukhin’s article is not the only one focusing on these problems. “Gazeta” reported that the military’s draft program on “The New Face of the Armed Forces” anticipates retaining the draft until at least 2030, thus eliminating one means commanders might have to maintain Russian dominance in the army.

And an essay carried by Sobkorr.ru discussing the situation argued that the desire of commanders to continue to rely on draftees not only reflects the continuing impact of what it called a Soviet-era mentality but also raised questions about what kind of conflicts Russia’s military in fact needs to be prepared for. Obviously, there are certain steps Moscow could take to address this situation – drafting a higher percentage of ethnic Russians than of others as it has done in the last two draft cycles or reducing the size of the military – but neither of those are attractive militarily or politically and consequently underscore just how many problems the Kremlin now has in filling the ranks.

The Associated Press reports:

At a once-secret airfield outside Moscow, test pilot Sergei Bogdan proudly introduces reporters to what was billed as the latest in Russian military aircraft technology, the Su-35 fighter-jet.

But the plane is only an upgrade of a 20-year-old model - and it can't match the speed and stealth of the U.S. F-22 Raptor, which entered service in 2005.

Former President Vladimir V. Putin, now Russia's powerful prime minister, has boasted of new weapons systems and of strengthening the armed forces, raising fears in the West of a Cold War-style military buildup. Flush with oil money, the Kremlin is in the market for new weapons.

But Russia's state-run defense industries, experts say, face a crumbling manufacturing base and pervasive corruption; they have produced little advanced armament in the Putin era.

The Victory Day parade in Red Square in May was intended to showcase the nation's military might. Instead, Russia's arsenal showed its age. Most of the planes, tanks and missiles that rolled past Lenin's Tomb dated to the 1980s or were slightly modernized versions of decades-old equipment.

Bogdan, affectionately patting his Su-35 in a hangar at the Zhukovsky Flight Test Center outside Moscow, hailed its agility, advanced electronics and new engines: "It's very light on controls and accelerates really well."

But Alexander Golts, an independent defense analyst, said the Su-35 is an example of how Russia's weapons industries are taking old designs out of mothballs and trying to sell them as new.

"The Soviet Union saw a tide of new weapons designs in the late 1980s which didn't reach a production stage," he said. "They can be described as new only in a sense that they weren't built in numbers."

Russian officials have spent two decades trying to build a so-called fifth-generation fighter equivalent to the Raptor, but the plane still has not made its maiden flight - and analysts are skeptical that the first test flights will take place next year as promised.

The director of the Sukhoi aircraft-maker, which is developing the new fighter, admitted that the company has a long way to go. But he said the pace of construction could accelerate soon.

"I don't think that we are lagging behind in a critical way," Mikhail Pogosyan said.

As work to build the new plane drags on, another major weapons program also faces hurdles. The new Bulava intercontinental ballistic missile, designed for use on nuclear submarines, has failed repeatedly in tests. Prospects for its deployment look dim.

"The loss of technologies and the brain drain have led to a steady degradation of military industries," said Alexander Khramchikhin, an analyst with the Institute for Political and Military Analysis.

Russia's economic meltdown after the collapse of the Soviet Union put many subcontractors out of business, rupturing long-established production links. Assembly plants were left to rely on limited stocks of Soviet-built components or forced to try to crank up their own production.

"Now, when we finally get state orders, plants often can't fulfill them due to the lack of components," Valery Voskoboinikov, a government official in charge of aviation industries at Russia's Ministry of Industry, testified recently at parliamentary hearings.

Despite Putin's pledges to modernize arsenals, during his eight years as president the military bought only a handful of new combat jets and tanks.

Russian arms sales have grown steadily in recent years, reaching a post-Soviet record of more than $7billion last year, according to official statistics. Russia accounted for a quarter of global arms sales in 2003-2007, a close second after the United States, according to the latest report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

But Russia has suffered several recent, highly publicized failures in arms exports, in which the broken subcontractor chain and swelling production costs were widely seen as key factors.

Russia recently failed to fulfill China's order for 38 Il-76 transport planes and Il-78 tankers, leading to the suspension of the deal. Earlier this year, Algeria returned MiG-29 fighter planes it bought from Russia, complaining of poor quality.

"The system has been broken all the way down," said Anatoly Sitnov, who oversees the aviation industries in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Russia's aging work force presents another challenge. Many highly skilled workers left defense industries in the 1990s for higher-paying jobs in the private sector, and the arms industry's meager wages have hampered the recruitment of younger workers.

The average age of Russia's aircraft industry workers is now 45, and that figure keeps rising. "There is an acute shortage of key specialists: turners, welders, millers," Voskoboinikov said.

Obsolete equipment has hurt efficiency. The last major modernization of defense plants occurred in the early 1980s, and many machine tools used in these factories are even older.

The government has responded by creating huge state-controlled military conglomerates, saying they will streamline manufacturing. Critics say they will stifle competition, encourage corruption and further weaken Russia's arms industry.

"We built good planes in the past because we had a competition between aircraft makers," Svetlana Savitskaya, a Soviet cosmonaut who is now a lawmaker, said during parliamentary hearings.

"Pulling all of them together under one roof will end competition and destroy what we had," she said. "But it could make it more convenient for some to steal government funds."

The International Herald Tribune reports:

Fears are growing that Russia's oil and gas fueled economy is running too hot — and about to boil over in the kind of mess that has scalded smaller East European neighbors.

Some of the most vehement warnings have been coming from the normally bland Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who saysgross domestic product is growing too fast and any ill-conceived stimulus measures such proposed tax cuts will lead to intolerable inflation and a sudden stall in growth.

Kudrin startled audience at a recent tax conference when he compared the issue to nuclear war. Cut taxes, Kudrin warned, and Russia won't maintain its thousands of atomic warheads. "The 33 percent share of the budget spent on defense and security is our guarantee that there won't be a nuclear war," the minister said.

His opponents, including Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina, are clamoring for the sharp tax cut to wean Russia off its addiction to imports, which are growing at an annual rate of over 40 percent.

The government is walking a tightrope. With all the government and private sector spending, inflation is reeling out of control — food prices are soaring at an annual rate of 25 percent — and threatens to submerge hundreds of thousands of people below the poverty line.

Dollars are flooding in thanks to record-high oil prices, and the country's rising middle class is on an unprecedented spending binge thanks to accessible bank loans. The government, in the meantime, is hustling to modernize exhausted infrastructure, pumping up the economy even more.

Kudrin's sensationalist remark about Russia's nukes comes at a time when the nation's economy is bucking recessionary trends around the globe. GDP growth, fueled by the rising price of Russia's mainstays, natural gas and oil, was 8.1 percent last year and 8.7 percent year-on-year in the first quarter of 2008.

"Russia's economy is overheated at the moment," said Eric Berglof, chief economist at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. "The growth rate is too high — two to three percentage points above potential."

An economy overheats when its capacity to produce cannot keep up with rising demand. A World Bank report issued in June lists seven signs — ranging from infrastructure constraints to accelerating property prices.

"The government has failed to address bottlenecks in the economy, to implement necessary infrastructure projects that would improve the power system, railroads, agriculture, or alleviate the traffic jams in Moscow," Berglof said.

But if the government throws too much money at resolving these problems, the risk is that the cash injection will only further fuel inflation, economists say.

During the waning months of his presidency last year, Vladimir Putin approved a number of big projects as part of a pre-election spending spree. As a result, state spending jumped 37 percent last year, and 70 percent in the fourth quarter alone. Putin's favored candidate, Dmitry Medvedev, was elected president and Putin is now Prime Minister.

Russia's consumer price index has climbed 9.1 percent from the start of the year to July 14, according to the state statistics agency — three percentage points higher than in the same period last year and outpacing the Central Bank's forecast of 10.5 percent for 2008. On an annual basis, prices soared above 15 percent.

As prices rise, workers demand higher pay, creating an inflationary spiral. And as food prices rise, poorer people spend more on necessities. FBK International, a consultancy, has forecast that the number of Russians living in poverty could increase this year for the first time since 2000 — by 1.1 million people to a total 20 million.

"Inflation needs to be cooled down sooner rather than later. If it is not dealt with early, the consequence will be ... a greater fall in the growth rate, as we see in Estonia and Latvia right now," said Anders Aslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, referring to the two Baltic states whose economies overheated and are now seeing a sharp decline in growth.

Tax-cut supporters insist that reducing the value-added tax from 18 to 12 percent will provide manufacturers the necessary respite to rejuvenate output. Also, by jump-starting manufacturing and small and medium businesses, tax-cut advocates also hope to diversify the economy, which is highly dependent on oil and gas.

Not so, countered Kudrin. The VAT accounts for one-third of federal budget revenues. Cutting it will not help economic restructuring, as badly as Russia needs it.

Concerns over Russia's economy coincide with the approaching 10th anniversary of the 1998 financial crisis, when the country defaulted on domestic debt and devalued the currency, causing a shock wave on international markets. Millions of Russians lost their savings.

Economists stress there is no chance of a repeat crisis. Russia has wisely used the oil windfall to tuck away hundreds of billions of dollars in strategic reserves and sovereign wealth funds — "rainy day" funds that it can use as a buffer against any short-term shock such as a precipitous drop in oil prices.

Jonas Bernstein, writing for Eurasia Daily Monitor:

It is often said in Russia that dissatisfaction with the country’s existing political system is greater among those living in the cities than those living in the countryside. Yet according to one observer who recently traveled through central Russia, dissatisfaction with the status quo is also rising in the countryside but is not being picked up by the country’s pollsters.

Recent polling by the independent Levada Center among the “elite” of the Russian middle class--those aged 24 to 35 and living in large cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg--found a high degree of uncertainty about the future and a strong feeling that their well-being was precarious, with half of those polled indicating that they would like to leave Russia temporarily or for good. Only 13 percent of those polled by the Levada Center agreed with the statement that Russia had entered a period of protracted stability, while 59 percent said the situation could change for the worse at any moment (see EDM, June 30).

Pavel Voshchanov, the prominent political analyst who served as Boris Yeltsin’s press secretary in the early 1990s, recently traveled through a dozen or so small cities in central Russia, including Dzerzhinsk, Balakhna and Gordoets in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast; Murom in Vladimir Oblast; Kashina in Smolensk Oblast; and Kalyazin in Tver Oblast. He found that contrary to the conventional wisdom, dissatisfaction with the political and economic status quo is rising in Russia’s heartland. Voshchanov paints a grim picture of the economic situation in the cities he visited, one that contrasts sharply with the booming economies of Moscow, St. Petersburg and other large Russian cities (Novaya gazeta, July 17).

“The Russian province, if you are guided by what it had during the Soviet period, has lost a considerable number of work places. Many of the old ones are closed, and nothing new has been built,” Voshchanov wrote. “The only things new are market stalls and drinking establishments with a scanty assortment of cheap products. There are few fancier novelties because there is no demand for them; no one can afford them. The only people buying [such things] are young people ‘doing management away from home’ (an expression heard from a Kalyazin resident whose son is working as the manager of a large store in Ivanovo). Is it possible to assert that people in the provinces are satisfied with their current situation? No. Prices are moving upward, and on all types of products, but salaries at non-governmental enterprises remain as they were two or three years ago. Two-thirds (and maybe more) of the provincials live off of [their] vegetable gardens. And it is also necessary to get to those [vegetable gardens]--but how, if prices for gasoline in the remote areas are now higher than in Moscow?”

According to Voshchanov, economic dissatisfaction in the Russian heartland is becoming political, although the political dissatisfaction thus far remains inchoate. Still, according to Voshchanov, negative feelings about the country’s leaders, particularly Vladimir Putin, the former president and current prime minister, are growing.

“It is a bit too early to judge President Medvedev; they shrug their shoulders,” Voshchanov wrote. “As a young guy from Kashina put it: ‘We don’t know him.’ But for Putin, the situation is changing for the worse, albeit slowly. It looks as if he, without wanting to, has stepped onto the minefield of Russian hostility and could easily become the target which, after a time, could be taking all the shots. This has already happened in Russia, and more than once: universal adoration (all the more so if it is produced … by pretty television pictures) quickly turns into universal hostility. The countryside voted for Putin largely because it remembered the soul chilling lack of money of the Yeltsin years, and with his [Putin’s] arrival in the Kremlin at least something returned to life, at least pensioners began to receive their crumbs … on time. But the pocketbook always dictates to the head. And what is it dictating this summer? It is not difficult to figure out.”

According to Voshchanov, the utilities bill for average Russians, which now accounts for a significant chunk of their monthly expenses, could end up playing a much larger role in Russian politics than “the packets of shares with multi-million [dollar] face values that casually end up in the hands of those who are currently close to the authorities or the authorities themselves.”

Voshchanov concludes that it is hard to believe polling data suggesting that those in the heartland are more satisfied with their situation than those in the cities. “Probably, behind the statistical calculation, the precision of which I am not disputing, is hidden something impossible to describe quantitatively,” he wrote. “For example, an unwillingness to speak openly to strangers about such delicate subjects. People in the provinces are distrustful, because it’s a stone’s throw from them to the boss, who is below only Putin and God, and they know first-hand how his revenge might be expressed. Assurances that everything will be anonymous and that they don’t have to sign anything don’t help. Anyone who thinks that this is the result of being downtrodden is mistaken. It is an intuitive lack of faith in justice, expressed in the formulation: ‘You leave, but we live here’” (Novaya gazeta, July 17).

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

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

The most disturbing of these propensities include:

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

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

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

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

Putin's remedies have the same flavor as Brezhnev's: Throw billions in subsidized credits and grants at the problem instead of strengthening property rights and making it easier for independent producers to compete.

• One-party rule. With its opposition marginalized and demoralized, and election results rigged, United Russia has emerged as the "ruling party," the term that used be reserved for the Soviet Communist Party. "Today we are the party responsible for the government," a top United Russia functionary told a Russian newspaper this year, "since our leader [Putin, the party's chairman] is the chairman of the government." Those who argue, rightly, that United Russia membership is only a ticket for ambitious apparatchiks to punch should remember that there was precious little ideological fervor and much cynicism in the 1970s as well. Lack of sincerity then did nothing to ameliorate the absence of corrective societal feedback and, with it, the inability to reverse dead-end policies that led to the crisis.

• A new oligarchy. Brezhnev drew some of his loudest cheers in his six-hour "reports" to party congresses when he declared "respect for the cadres." Delivering his presidential valediction this spring, Putin's longest applause came when he cited "stability" as his crowning achievement.

With virtually every top Putin official and adviser retained, sent to the Security Council or made "presidential envoy" to some part of the country, a new nomenklatura has emerged -- insulated from media criticism, spared political competition and effectively immune from criminal prosecution. As in Soviet times, the members of this political master race are almost never fired, only retired with honors or reassigned. Since the Putin "Politburo" and "Central Committee" are a good 20 years younger than Brezhnev's, retirement is not an option.

The 1970s made clear what the belief in official infallibility and omnipotence, utter disregard for public opinion, ossification, and pandemic corruption could lead to. Most of all, the experience of Brezhnev's Russia confirms that authoritarian "stabilization" is a curious political commodity. Its benefits are instantly apparent but its price is revealed only gradually -- and may be devastatingly high. As he moves forward, President Dmitry Medvedev would do well to remember the lessons from Russia's other most stable regime.

A commenter wrote: "It's a shame. I like Russians. They deserve better, but they have gotten what they asked for."

The Moscow Times reports:

It was once the pride of Soviet telephone technology, producing the bulky phones that graced the desks of countless factory directors and Party officials.

Now, the Pskov ATS Factory has fallen into disrepair, unable to compete with slicker manufacturers like Samsung and Panasonic. Part of its premises has become a shopping center, and the factory's output has been reduced to a trickle, although a sign outside proudly states that its technology is used by the president and security ministries.

The collapse of the Soviet planned economy was not kind to the Pskov region, a stretch of northwestern Russia that was largely agricultural until the 1950s.

Though rich in history and full of scenic lakes and forests, the Pskov region has none of the commodities -- oil, gas and metals -- that have driven Russia's economic expansion during the past eight years.

Despite recent growth in construction and retail, which has brought shopping malls and high-end apartments to Pskov, the region as a whole lags behind Moscow or nearby St. Petersburg in terms of its job market and living standards.

"You can only have a normal life in the metropolises, in Moscow and St. Petersburg," said Alexander, a taxi driver. "In the villages, people are hungry. Believe me. And it's impossible to move to the towns because it's too expensive."

Evening out the huge disparities between Russia's regions is one of the main challenges facing policymakers today. It is a task that goes hand in hand with efforts to revamp the country's crumbling infrastructure and diversify its economy away from oil and gas.

Soaring oil prices have poured money into the federal budget and driven impressive growth rates, but they have also increased regional disparity. Measured in terms of GDP per capita, the country's wealthiest region, oil-rich Tyumen, was 44 times richer than the poorest region, Ingushetia, in 2006, the last year for which data is available from the State Statistics Service.

And Moscow, the country's financial and political heart, is like a different country by many economic measures. Living standards in the capital are comparable to those of Malta and the Czech Republic, while living standards in impoverished Ingushetia and Tuva are comparable to those of Mongolia, Guatemala and Tajikistan, according to a report released last year by the UN Development Program.

"The income gap between our citizens is still unacceptably wide," then-President Vladimir Putin said during his last annual state-of-the-nation address in April 2007.

In the same speech, Putin announced plans to spend billions of rubles on fixing roads and replacing dilapidated Khrushchev-era housing. The proposals were in the same vein as the so-called "national projects" -- a group of four much-publicized initiatives to improve housing, agriculture, education and healthcare throughout the country, overseen by Dmitry Medvedev, who became president this year.

More evidence that the Kremlin was serious about helping the regions emerged in September when Putin chose Dmitry Kozak, a longtime aide known as his favorite troubleshooter, to head the Regional Development Ministry. Putin then granted the ministry control of the multibillion-dollar Investment Fund for infrastructure projects. The moves raised the profile of a once-obscure ministry.

Since his appointment, Kozak has proposed a range of initiatives aimed at reforming the federal government's relationship with the regions and, ultimately, sparking development at the regional level.

Experts have praised the Kremlin's decision to pay attention to regional issues after what they described as many years of neglect.

"Russia has finally realized that having a regional growth policy is important," said Natalya Zubarevich, director for regional programs at the Independent Institute for Social Policy. "And this is thanks to Kozak."

But Zubarevich and other experts gave mixed reviews to Kozak's initiatives. The key question, they said, is whether the government -- armed with billions of dollars and a clear mandate from the Kremlin -- will revert to the familiar methods of Soviet-style state planning or whether it will serve the needs of a contemporary market economy.

Filling in Potholes

One thing experts and officials agree on -- along with perhaps every single driver in Russia -- is that something must be done about the dire state of the country's roads.

Alexander complained bitterly as he drove his taxi over a bumpy, recently patched-up country road in the Pskov region.

"All they've done is fill in the potholes," said Alexander, who asked that his last name not be published for fear of reprisals. "In a month and a half, it will be back to the way it was before."

The Pskov region is strategically located, with two major transportation corridors running through it -- the east-west Moscow-Riga highway and the north-south St. Petersburg-Kiev highway -- and borders with two EU countries, Latvia and Estonia, as well as Belarus. That brings the region about 20 percent of Russia's international trucking, according to the Pskov Chamber of Commerce.

But until its dismal roads are fixed, Pskov will not realize its potential as a logistics hub, said Lev Shlosberg, head of the regional branch of the liberal Yabloko party.

"The roads need to be improved dramatically," said Shlosberg, who also edits a local opposition newspaper, Pskovskaya Gubernia, and heads an NGO devoted to regional development. "Right now, they are in an utterly wrecked state. Cars simply fall apart from driving on them."

Improvements are also needed at the border crossings with Latvia and Estonia, where the lines waiting to cross can sometimes be 1,000 vehicles long, Shlosberg said.

To maximize the impact of its infrastructure projects, experts say the government should focus on improving the transportation corridors connecting Russia's main growth centers.

Besides Moscow and St. Petersburg, this includes cities like Samara, Yekaterinburg and Krasnodar, which have enjoyed high growth rates in recent years, said Zubarevich of the Independent Institute for Social Policy.

"Development is driven by large cities, by agglomerations," Zubarevich said.

"You need to stimulate the growth of agglomerations, and you need to invest a lot of money in infrastructure projects to connect major growth centers and shorten the economic distance between them," she said. "Then traffic and logistics become simpler, which is very convenient for business."

Officials have announced big plans to improve the country's road, rail, air and port networks. On May 20, in one of his first moves as prime minister, Putin approved a seven-year, $570 billion program to overhaul the country's transportation infrastructure -- Russia's largest spending project since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Investors have also been closely watching the Investment Fund, which was started in 2005 to finance infrastructure projects through public-private partnerships, and which is now overseen by Kozak's Regional Development Ministry.

So far, about $14 billion from the fund has been allocated to 20 projects, ranging from a seaport in St. Petersburg to a hydropower plant on the Angara River in Siberia.

Some of those projects have been sharply criticized by experts, who say Investment Fund spending decisions are driven by the lobbying efforts of governors and big business interests, rather than a coherent development strategy.

Alexei Sidorenko, a regional analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, singled out the Ural Polyarny railroad as an example of bad policy. Partly financed by the Investment Fund, the railroad will connect several regions along the northern part of the Ural Mountains that are sparsely populated but rich in oil, gas and minerals.

"They choose projects like this over badly needed road repairs," Sidorenko said.

"Such investment projects might be effective in making money in the short run," he said. "But in terms of long-term strategy, they will actually thwart innovation and economic development."

A spokesman for the Regional Development Ministry declined immediate comment and asked that questions be submitted by e-mail. As of Thursday, the ministry had not responded to the e-mailed request sent June 4.
Zubarevich said the government should focus on the more populated European part of Russia, instead of trying to conquer the vast stretches of Siberia and the Far East. "Infrastructure in the east is important, but when infrastructure is falling apart in the European part of Russia, the east cannot be a priority," she said. "There will never be enough money for it."

'Upside-Down' System

It was perhaps a bit silly when, speaking on national television in 2005, then-President Putin promised a Stavropol region pensioner that the government would build water pipes to her village so she wouldn't have to walk 300 meters to the nearest well.

But the promise, which Putin made during his annual televised call-in show, was emblematic of the political system he had created.

Following the turmoil of the 1990s, Putin sought to restore the Kremlin's authority by strengthening the so-called power vertical. Once-powerful regional leaders were brought into line and many of their powers shifted to the federal government. In the wake of the Beslan hostage crisis of 2004, Putin canceled the election of governors and made them effectively Kremlin-appointed figures.

The idea was to clean up governance in the regions, widely seen as ineffective and corrupt, by making governors report directly to the president.

But some believe that centralization went too far. Critics argue that federal officials cannot possibly grasp the specific issues facing each region and that governors and mayors are now largely powerless to help their constituents.

By some estimates, only 30 percent of taxes collected in the regions remain in regional budgets, while the rest go to the federal government. This means that many governors spend their time lobbying Moscow for funds instead of trying to raise their tax base.

"Why should they bother with economic development?" said Shlosberg, the Yabloko leader in Pskov. "If they can only keep 30 percent of income taxes, why should they try to stimulate business and create jobs? Their main activity is lobbying for budgetary transfers from above. The system is totally upside-down."

Kozak has called for a range of reforms that would give more powers to regional and municipal governments.

"We in the federal government should not fall into illusion," Kozak said at an April meeting with regional leaders of Delovaya Rossia, a lobbying group for small and medium-size businesses. "We should not fantasize that we can come up with the right answers for each of 86 regions and 24,000 municipalities."

Giving governors real authority to set regional investment policies -- along with the funds necessary to carry them out -- is the best way to come up with policies appropriate for each region, Kozak said.

"They shouldn't be here in Moscow running around the State Duma or the Finance Ministry," he said. "They should be working in their regions, trying to develop their potential tax base."

It is unclear, however, whether Kozak can succeed in pushing through his proposals.

Kozak had a mixed track record while working in Putin's presidential administration, where he drew up a pair of complex reforms -- one aimed at the judicial system, the other at the country's notorious bureaucracy -- that both foundered after encountering fierce resistance.

He also proposed a self-governance reform designed to make local government more accountable. The reform, which has many similarities to Kozak's current proposals, became law in 2003, but the State Duma later voted to push back its implementation to 2009 amid fears that local governments were not ready to take on additional responsibilities.

Federal officials appear reluctant to give power to regional and local governments because they do not want to lose control over how money is spent.

"[Federal officials] say money gets stolen at the local level," Shlosberg said. "They say governors steal money, mayors steal money, district bosses steal money. What, so people in Moscow never steal anything?"

Kozak and other officials have discussed ways to crack down on regional corruption by tightening Moscow's control over how governors spend money and dismissing the ones found to be corrupt.

But the experts interviewed for this report agreed unanimously that there was only one sure-fire way to make governors act responsibly: to bring back gubernatorial elections, making them accountable to their voters.

"As we learned from experience, gubernatorial elections did bring some unfortunate candidates to power," said Sidorenko of the Carnegie Moscow Center. "But people learn from their mistakes and eventually elect responsible people. And the governors themselves feel more responsible."

Corruption is a key factor holding back regional development, experts said. One issue, for example, is that companies with close ties to regional governments often have monopolies in their regions, crushing competition and preventing innovation.

"One of the main problems for regional development is the presence of monopolies at the regional level," said Yaroslav Lissovolik, chief economist for Deutsche Bank Russia. "Activating competition and fighting monopolies is very important here."

Some of the worst regions in this respect are the ethnic republics of the North Caucasus, which are also among the poorest, most undeveloped parts of Russia, Zubarevich said.

"Business is not going there because institutions there are very weak," she said. "They have feudalism, and laws serve the people in power."

Moreover, experts stress that no reform plan -- no matter how well-intentioned -- can succeed unless corruption is reined in.

For instance, one often-discussed idea is the creation of special economic zones where businesses get tax breaks and other incentives for setting up shop. Such zones have helped stimulate growth from Ireland to India to China, prompting Russian officials to draw up plans for Bangalore-style technoparks and Dubai-style seaports.

But the zones would not do much good if corruption and favoritism is allowed to fester. "A special economic zone, if it is in a country full of bad institutions, will not be very helpful," Zubarevich said.

Workers Wanted

Heiner Berr is one of the few foreign investors in the Pskov region. In 2002, he and two other Germans started a resort on the shores of Chudskoye Lake, a large body of water that straddles the Russian-Estonian border. The resort, called Chudskoye Podvorye, now has 43 cabins, a restaurant, a masseuse and a petting zoo.

Today, Berr's biggest problem is finding qualified staff to serve visitors and maintain the facilities, he said in an interview. "We used to only have problems with bureaucrats," Berr said. "Now we only have problems with staff."

A shortage of labor is one of the biggest problems facing companies in the region, said Alexander Staroselsky, vice president of the Pskov Chamber of Commerce.

"There is a dire shortage of skilled workers," Staroselsky said.

"Our region has too few workers, and it gets especially bad in the case of skilled personnel, like builders, engineers and IT specialists," he said, adding that many qualified graduates leave for nearby St. Petersburg.

Any attempts to stimulate regional development will bump up against the problem of depopulation, experts say. But the most obvious solution -- attracting immigrants from abroad -- is also the most improbable, given the widespread animosity toward migrants among politicians and the public.

"Our country does not have enough people," Zubarevich said. "We need to attract migrants. But at the same time, Russia is a frighteningly xenophobic country."

The government should also encourage internal migration, helping Russians move from unproductive regions to places that need labor, Zubarevich said.

"There are many barriers to moving," she said. "First, there are administrative barriers, like the registration system. Then there is the housing market. Housing prices are insane in the places where there are jobs, and people can't afford to live there."

Pskov has benefited from a program to relocate people from remote northern regions, Staroselsky said, but he conceded that depopulation remained a problem.

Last year, the Pskov regional government announced plans to build an $800 million oil refinery in Velikiye Luki, the region's second-largest city, and a 1 billion euro ($1.6 billion) pulp-and-paper plant backed by Estonian, Norwegian and Austrian investors, which it said would create 2,000 new jobs.

Pskov Governor Mikhail Kuznetsov has called the projects "locomotives" designed to boost the regional economy.

Some have criticized the projects, however, questioning their feasibility and saying it would be better to focus on small business, which represents a small fraction of Russia's economy compared with the economies of Western nations.

"If you look at the Russian economy, all you see are big monsters, and there's no room left for small business," Shlosberg said. "The state doesn't like to pick at tiny grains. It wants to scoop out big spoonfuls from the barrel, and nothing else interests it."

Sergei Yermolayev, a spokesman for the Pskov regional government, acknowledged that small business was underdeveloped in the region but defended the two big projects.

"There is a clearly thought-out business plan," he said in an e-mail, pointing out that Western investors stood behind the pulp-and-paper plant and that construction on the plant had already begun.

But poorly conceived "megaprojects" are all too common in Russia, experts say, calling them a legacy of the Soviet system.

"Since most officials are not actually very well qualified, they make many decisions on the basis of whether something will make an impression or not," Sidorenko said. "Thus we get a lot of loud, extremely difficult to implement projects like, for instance, an ecotourism village in Khakassia that needs several billion dollars just to start working."

Zubarevich agreed, arguing that an "imperial syndrome" stood in the way of making sensible regional development policies.

"We don't know how to do ordinary work," she said. "We know how to come up with a slogan, make a lot of noise for a month or so, and then forget everything."

Radio Free Europe reports that, as always, the number one form of "birth control" in barbaric Russia is the abortion. Russians love their country all right -- right up until they have to actually do anything personal to support. The Chinese can't get their people to stop having babies, and the Russians can't get them to start.

Dilyara Latypova is a gynecologist in the Russian republic of Tatarstan. With more than 25 years of experience, she's seen some progress in family planning since the days of the Soviet Union, when such topics were largely taboo.

Still, she says, the situation today is far from ideal. For many women, the most common method of birth control remains a Soviet-era holdover: abortion.

"Young women who think that having an abortion is an easy thing are wrong," Latypova tells RFE/RL's Tatar-Bashkir Service. "An abortion is not only an operation. It's a deep psychological trauma for a woman. This is an operation that causes a woman physical and moral pain. I don't think it's the right decision."

Despite an abundance of new family-planning options, Latypova says lack of public awareness and prohibitive expenses -- like $25 monthly packs of birth control pills -- mean many women still see abortion as their only choice.

"Students and young girls can't afford birth control. Many girls are afraid to talk about it with their mothers and ask for money," she says. "An unplanned pregnancy can cause them enormous stress. They immediately opt for an abortion, and don't even tell their parents or boyfriends."

Russia was the first country in the world to legalize abortion, in 1920. The procedure was briefly driven underground, when Soviet leader Josef Stalin banned abortion in an attempt to encourage women to have larger families.

But after Stalin’s death in 1953, the ban was lifted. A decade later, the practice had become so common that the USSR officially registered 5.5 million abortions, compared to just 2 million live births.

A Private Matter

The number of abortions has fallen dramatically since then. The most recent available figures, for 2006, show 1.6 million abortions compared to 1.5 million live births -- a dismal figure, especially in a country struggling with a looming demographic crisis.

Women are entitled to abortions up until the 12th week of pregnancy, and -- unlike in many countries -- are not obligated to alert relatives or give a reason for requesting the procedure.

The relative ease of getting an abortion, in fact, has blinded many women to the numerous health risks associated with the process, especially for those who turn to it more than once. "The complications include bleeding and inflammation in the short term," says Lyubov Yerofeyeva, the director of the Russian Family Planning Association, an NGO that works to improve sex education in Russia. "In the long term, the most severe complication could be infertility."

Yerofeyeva is speaking in a brightly lit office in central Moscow whose walls are adorned with posters of cuddly babies. But Yerofeyeva and other association employees can also paint a stark picture of the reality of abortion in Russia today.

Sex education is not part of the national curriculum in Russia. So when most young people become sexually active, at around the age of 16, Yerofeyeva says they know almost nothing about how women become pregnant.

"You can't say the idea of family planning and birth control is flourishing," she says. "The tradition in Russia is not to talk about sexuality loudly, not to tackle these issues -- even within a family, even between husband and wife. Sometimes they’re not even communicating about their own sexual relations. These issues have always been very closed."

Growing Options

Part of the reason abortions were so prevalent during the Soviet era, health professionals say, was that contraceptives were so unreliable. Oral contraception was not available and more often than not, Soviet-made condoms and intrauterine devices didn’t work.

In the years after the Soviet collapse, before the expense grew too great, some gynecological clinics attempted to provide birth control for free, a practice that has proved successful in places like the United Kingdom. The number of Russian women who use the pill as their primary form of birth control remains low -- between 3 and 13 percent, as compared to 52 percent in Europe. The predominant form of preventive birth control is the highly uncertain rhythm method. But Vladimir Shchigolev at the Moscow office of the World Health Organization says the situation is improving.

"At the moment, the younger generation knows more about family planning, and they have better access to family planning services. Today, they can go to the pharmacy and buy contraceptive pills, condoms, modern IUDs that are quite different from Soviet IUDs -- they are absolutely safe," Shchigolev says. "Of course they talk about abortion, but they talk about abortion as not a good way to prevent pregnancy and to plan a family.”

Abortion techniques have come a long way since the Soviet era, when 35-year-old Olga Lipovskaya related her experience in Francine du Plessix Gray’s acclaimed book "Soviet Women Walking the Tightrope."

“You stand in line before the door of the operating room, waiting to be taken in,” she says. “Then it's your turn, and you go into a hall splattered with blood, where two doctors are aborting seven or eight women at the same time; they're usually very rough and rude. If you're lucky they give you a little sedative.”

According to du Plessix Gray, Olga estimated that she had had about 14 abortions in total, and she knew women who had had as many as 25.

'Huge Psychological Trauma'

Today, modern techniques make the experience less traumatic and dangerous, but Natalia Vartapetova, the director of a Russian NGO called the Institute of Family Health says complications following abortions are still widespread.

"Unfortunately, still, the consequences of abortion are among the key causes of maternal mortality in Russia," she says. "One of the problems, perhaps, is infection control -- infection and sepsis afterward -- or other complications, like hemorrhage. Infertility, as well -- we know about one-third of infertility is due to previous abortions."

But for all that, the situation is improving, Vartapetova says. One of her projects is to educate health professionals about modern methods of birth control, and in the 20 or so regions where the programs are taking place, abortion rates have fallen.

And with the population level in severe decline -- demographers estimate it could fall below 100 million by 2050, from 150 million in 1992 -- the Russian government is also keen to tackle the issue of abortion. Last year, then-President Vladimir Putin introduced a long-term project to encourage women to have families with more than one child.

The pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi this year staged a demonstration to protest abortion, adorning rows of cemetery-style crosses with signs reading "architect," "driver," "editor," and other professions -- a nod to the potential labor lost to terminated pregnancies. (Nashi's conservative social streak extends to birth control; the group has protested against condoms and other preventive family-planning methods.)

Vartapetova warns that attempts to prevent abortions or to restrict access to birth control would be a mistake. "When we talk about the demographic crisis, quite often there's a misunderstanding -- that family planning leads to smaller family size. International evidence that shows that that's not true -- and that family planning actually improves women's health and decreases abortion rates. But this information isn't that well-known among our policymakers.”

Doctors like Latypova in Tatarstan are also quick to remind women of the enormous emotional cost that abortion can inflict. While the topic of abortion does not spark the kind of fierce moral debate seen in countries like the United States, Latypova says terminating a pregnancy can be a devastating experience.

"You can't compare the emotional state of a woman who undergoes an abortion with anything else. As both a doctor and a mother, I can say that it's a huge psychological trauma. There are very few women who can just breezily say, 'oh, I had an abortion.' I think there's no abortion that doesn't leave its mark on a woman."

Paul Goble reports:

Violent crime in Russia continues to rise 13 percent a year and now may even exceed the levels of the 1990s, a trend that is hitting that country’s mid-sized cities hard and one that calls into question Vladimir Putin’s largely successful effort to present himself at home and abroad as the man who brought law and order to the Russian Federation. That is the depressing conclusion of the cover story in the current issue of “Russian Newsweek,” a story that its analysts had to piece together given Moscow’s increasing unwillingness since 2002 to release accurate information about crime in general and by urban area in particular.

The magazine’s researchers focused on the 156 cities in Russia with populations of more than 100,000 each and identified the 50 “most dangerous” cities in that country in terms of the rate of crime per capita, places where in most cases few Westerners live but in which large numbers of Russian citizens are forced to try to survive. In per capita terms, the ten most dangerous cities in terms of crime were Surgut, Perm, Syktyvkar, Berezniki, Khabarovsk, Chita, Yakutsk, Irkutsk, and Abakan, all of which had crime rates exceeding 395 crimes annually per 10,000, a figure that means one in every 25 residents was touched by crime during the last 12 months. (Although the capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, have the largest number of crimes because of their size, the two rank relatively low in terms of the number of crimes per capita, with Moscow where there were 198 crimes per 10,000 residents last year only in 111th place among Russian cities and St. Petersburg where there were 176 crimes per 10,000 people 122nd.)

In addition to these global figures, the “Russian Newsweek” analysts after a multi-month investigation came up with rates per capita for the same set of cities concerning especially violent ones like murders, rapes and attempted rapes, and narcotics crimes. The leaders in the murder category for the period 2002-2006 were Kyzyl with 9.32 murders per 10,000 residents, Chita with 7.91, and Yakutsk with 7.31. The leaders in the rapes and attempted rapes category were Kyzyl with 5.55 per 10,000, Gorno-Altaysk with 2.51, and Chita with 2.02. The leaders in the narcotics category were Birobidzhan with 46.51 such crimes for every 10,000 residents, Surgut with 37.98 and Tyumen with 37.95. Other cities trailed far behind in terms of the rate of crime, including again Moscow and St. Petersburg and those places where foreigners are most likely to live.

As every student of crime knows, statistics about this aspect of human activity are notoriously unreliable. On the one hand, many crimes are never reported to the authorities either because the victims do not expect justice or because they do not want to have to deal with the authorities or to call attention to themselves But on the other, officials sometimes have an interest in boosting the number of crimes they have to deal with in order to justify higher budgets and sometimes have equal but opposite interest in suppressing the number of crimes reported in order to demonstrate their success in maintaining law and order.

Over the last 15 years, all these factors have played a role in Russia, the Moscow weekly points out. In 2001, for example, the interior minister demanded that militiamen who refused to register crimes be fired. As a result the number of crimes in Russia jumped from five million in that year to 13 million the next, a figure that many experts say still understated crime there.
But during the later Putin years, the Kremlin sought to present itself as a victor in the fight against crime, and the authorities suppressed information and probably understated the number of crimes they did report lest people discover that “the wild 1990s” had been succeeded by the equally “wild 2000s."

In the opinion of Moscow criminologist Boris Kalachev, the reason for Russia’s high rates of crime is the ratio between rich and poor. When the number of poor is more than four times the number of rich people, he argues, crime goes up. In most of Western Europe, this ratio is five to one. In Italy and Spain, it is seven to one, and there the crime situation is worse. But in Russia, he notes, this critical ratio is far higher. In the mid-1990s, it may have been as high as 100 to one and even if one accepts the official figure of 12 to one which most experts think is far too low, the ratio now is 12 poor people to every rich one, a pattern that generates crime, according to Kalachev. Reducing this ratio should be a major state goal, he says, but doing so won’t be easy, given the high level of inflation the country is experiencing. At present, he says, there is a curious coincidence that may say far more about the future than anyone cares to think: Both crime and inflation are rising at almost exactly the same rate – 13 percent.

Georgy Bovt, writing in the Moscow Times:

There was no line as I stepped up to the express-mail window at Moscow's Central Post Office on Tverskaya Ulitsa. The attendant was a middle-aged woman wearing a standard-issue blue smock. In the glorious, time-honored Soviet tradition, she responded to my "hello" with stone-faced silence. I had to send some boarding passes and receipts to Brussels for expense reimbursement to a European organization that had invited me to a conference. I decided to use the express-mail service just to be sure the documents would be delivered at all.

"What do you have?" the woman snapped at me.

Having no need to keep my correspondence a secret, I showed her the rumpled papers.

"We don't take official documents or tickets," she said. She told me submit the paperwork to the postal customs office -- the only one in Moscow, apparently -- on Varshavskoye Shosse.

"But these aren't official documents," I protested. "They are just used tickets and some taxi receipts." I suggested that she call her superiors to resolve the matter. She refused, but I insisted. Finally, she gave in and lazily made the call.

In the end, the situation was resolved in my favor, but during the whole experience, I found myself back in the Soviet era. I encountered the same rudeness from state employees, saw the same ancient equipment, filled out the same archaic blanks and submitted them to the same type of unfriendly woman who looked as if she hadn't smiled since Yury Gagarin beat the Americans to space.

Former Sberbank CEO Andrei Kazmin was recently appointed as the new head of Russia's postal service. He is requesting billions of rubles in state funding to institute reforms, pointing out that mail carriers' salaries of 5,000 rubles (about $200) per month are shamefully low.

But this leads to a more fundamental question concerning not only the postal system, but many other Russian companies and government bureaucracies. Will throwing money at these institutions help them and their employees to become more effective?

Unfortunately, money alone cannot change a person's mentality. For example, I pay a mailman a little extra to deliver a particular magazine to my door instead of leaving it in the lobby, where it can be easily lifted. The result? The magazine is never delivered on time, and I end up having to go to the local post office to sort things out with the mail carrier. "Why haven't you delivered the magazine," I asked once. "After all, I gave you money for it." He replied lackadaisically, "That's life, I guess." Even with his miserly salary, it appears that the postal worker doesn't want to work for the extra money that I am willing to pay him.

Despite significantly lower salaries, average postage prices in Russia are only 10 percent to 15 percent lower than in the United States and New Zealand, and 30 percent less expensive than in Germany. Moreover, delays of a week or more in the delivery of periodicals have become common, even in major cities.

The postal system behaves like my listless mailman -- it lacks the motivation and the ability to turn a profit. It has yet to earn money from mass advertising (otherwise known as junk mail), and it does not know how to generate additional income by cross-marketing consumer goods using its expansive postal network, although such sales account for the bulk of postal-service income in several foreign countries.

Even if postal workers' salaries were tripled, I seriously doubt that the sour-faced woman in the blue smock, or any of her co-workers, would give me a friendly smile.

Paul Goble reports:

Russia’s domestic air transportation system – hitherto the only reliable year-round link for many places in that enormous country which lack railways or all-season roads – continues to decline, despite past promises by Vladimir Putin and more recent ones by President Dmitry Medvedev that Moscow will subsidize some routes and build new airports.

In an article posted online today, journalist Natalya Malinina reports that the number of airports in the Russian Federation fell from 1302 in 1991 to 451 in 2002 to 351 in 2007, with 45 more closing I the last year alone and more likely to be forced to close in the coming months because of infrastructure problems.

This decline in the number of domestic airports has been paralleled by an equally precipitous fall in the number of domestic carriers, from a high of 393 in 1994 to 299 in 2000 to 41 today, a fall-off that reflects the failure of many of the spinoffs from the state airline, sometimes known as “baby Aeroflots,” to make a profit. And in addition, the number of Russian airports handling international flights has fallen sharply as well. In the 1990s, many of the country’s regional airports handled flights to neighboring countries both within the former Soviet space and more broadly, but the number doing so now has fallen to 69 and the government plans to reduce that figure to eight.

In addition to the obvious centralizing and isolating consequences of this trend, one far more extreme than was the case in the last years of Soviet power, this post-1991 collapse in domestic air transportation makes it far more difficult for the regions to attract investment from other regions or abroad or thus to retain workers and their families. But a major reason for this collapse lies precisely in a Soviet-era arrangement that the Russian government has not changed. Unlike some forms of transportation infrastructure, airports remain federal property, and consequently, even those regional leaders who would like to spend money to build up these hubs are not able to without Moscow’s permission.

At various points during his presidency, Vladimir Putin promised to do something about domestic air transport. He even made it the subject of a section of his 2004 message to the Duma, but despite his words and those of his subordinates, Moscow did little or nothing even to slow the decline in this sector. With the coming to office of Dmitry Medvedev, some aviation and regional officials have expressed the hope that things may change. On the one hand, they point to Transportation Minister Igor Levitin’s promise in Sochi on May 24th that Moscow will begin to subsidize some regional air routes in order to prevent a further contraction. And on the other, these same officials cite the Kremlin press service report on June 3rd that Medvedev is concerned about the terrible state of the country’s airports, where conditions are now so bad that often “airplanes do not fly” even within a single federation subject let alone among them. But in reporting these hopes, Malinina suggests that Russians should be asking themselves whether those who destroyed the country’s air network can be trusted to rebuild it, whether the subsidies will actually support flying or be corruptly siphoned off, and whether the big plans Moscow has announced for a few places are either possible or safe?

BusinessWeek magazine reports:

The statistics are terrifying: 10 times as many auto-related fatalities as in the U.S. Decrepit highways and drunk and careless drivers are blamed

On May 9, Russia celebrated the anniversary of its victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. The next day — the Saturday of a long holiday weekend — the toll of auto accidents reached 601. Three accidents alone claimed 18 lives.

Two days later a bus collided with a truck on the Moscow to St. Petersburg road, killing eight more people.

"The motorway linking Moscow and St. Petersburg is the road of death. It's scary to drive there with heavy trucks rushing along in the oncoming lane," said Aleksandr Latyshev, a journalist for the Izvestiya newspaper who often uses the road.

The highway between Russia's two largest cities is one lane in each direction. About 1,500 people die on it every year, most in head-on collisions. Vehicles also kill scores of pedestrians in towns along the highway.

"The speed limit in towns is 60 kilometers per hour. But no one goes the speed limit because when you're tired and the road is good, you want to get home as soon as possible," Latyshev said.

In this vast country, a deadly combination of careless driving, rampant corruption, aging cars, and bad roads adds up to a huge risk for those who get behind the wheel and for those who get in their way.

The statistics paint a grisly picture:

• About 33,300 people died nationwide in 233,800 accidents registered in 2007. That's almost as many auto-related fatalities as the entire European Union, which has about 3.5 times Russia's population and six times as many vehicles.

• In 2007, about 900 deaths per 1 million vehicles were reported in Russia, 10 times as many as in Germany and 5.5 times as many as in the United States.

• About 900 people die each year on the Moscow to Rostov-on-Don highway, a major route from central Russia to Black Sea resorts, and on the road linking Yekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk.

• Although more Russians die of respiratory and circulatory diseases each year, in the Federal Statistics Service's "accidents, poisonings, and injuries category" for 2006, only suicide claimed more lives than transport accidents.

NIHILISM ON WHEELS

Vladimir Kuzin, deputy chief of Russia's traffic police, blamed undisciplined drivers for most fatalities. "The primary cause of high mortality on the roads [is] drivers' lack of respect for the law, a nihilism about the rules of the road. Drivers don't maintain speed limits, don't yield to pedestrians on crosswalks, and don't wear their seat belts."

Drivers were responsible for 84 percent of fatal accidents last year, according to official statistics. This year, the government hiked fines for driving offenses. The penalty for running a red light, for instance, rose from 100 to 700 rubles (about $30), for not wearing a seatbelt from 50 to 500 rubles (about $20), for going more than 60 kph over the speed limit from 500 to 5,000 rubles (about $200) plus a license suspension for two to four months. The average monthly wage in Russia is about 13,500 rubles ($560).

Those caught driving under the influence face losing their license for two to three years.

Perhaps as a result, road accidents fell by 11 percent in the first three months of 2008 from the same period in 2007. Fatalities dropped by 10 percent and accidents involving drunk drivers plunged by 20 percent.

"Our penalties are still more lenient than in other countries, but the fine surge has had an effect," said Vladimir Shevchenko, spokesman for the traffic police.

Vladimir Fyodorov, traffic police chief from 1990 to 2003 and currently a member of the upper parliamentary chamber, notes a slight improvement in road safety. "In 1990, every fourth accident was linked to drunken drivers, whereas now it's only 9 percent. Although one in 10 vehicles being driven by a drunken driver is still a lot."

But critics say the higher fines have just pushed up bribes. Many drivers pulled over by traffic police offer bribes amounting to 50 percent of a possible fine. The Moscow-based Indem think tank estimates that the total amount of annual bribes increased between fivefold and tenfold from an estimated 500 million rubles before the new penalties took effect.

In an April poll conducted by the independent Levada Center, 57 percent of drivers said they had encountered traffic police who solicited bribes by threatening to fine them for fabricated offenses.

For its part, the Interior Ministry says it fights corruption, citing 7,000 instances of bribery uncovered and 5,300 police officers sacked in 2007.

Viktor Pokhmelkin, chairman of the Russian Movement of Vehicle Drivers, predicted the fine surge will have only a short-term effect as drivers become accustomed to them. As for the traffic police, he said, "Traffic police react to offenses rather than prevent them. They have no incentives to do the latter."

Pokhmelkin blamed old Russian-made vehicles for the high fatality rate.

"The Russian cars lack basic safety devices like air bags and anti-lock braking systems. Fewer people die in foreign-made vehicles," he said.

Russia has the oldest vehicle fleet in Europe. The average car is 14.3 years old compared with 8 years old in EU countries. Automobiles younger than 10 years account for only 19 percent of those on the road, according to the Avtostat analysis center. The 7.7 million rear-wheel-drive Ladas on Russian roads account for 26.5 percent of the total number of vehicles in the country.

Those rickety cars drive each day along clogged, ramshackle roads.

Poor roads caused nearly 44,000 accidents and 6,700 auto-related deaths last year. Russia, the world's biggest country, has only slightly more distance of paved roadways than Germany and less than one-eighth that of the United States.

And many of the country's highways, about one-third, according to the Transportation Ministry, need urgent repair.

Meanwhile, new road construction cannot hope to keep pace with increasing car ownership. The number of vehicles in Russia more than tripled between 1991 and 2007, while the length of roads grew by only about one-third. Aleksandr Mirashin, deputy minister of transportation, told the State Duma in March that the government plans to build 63,000 kilometers of roads before 2015, extending the road infrastructure by 9 percent. As many as 50,000 of the 120,000 Russian towns lack paved roads.

But new or improved highways bring with them a new set of problems.

"We repair roads, fill the potholes, but accidents rise. You won't drive fast on a bumpy road," Vladimir Fyodorov, the former traffic police chief, said.

The Russian authorities admit that they will not be able to reduce auto-related fatalities to levels registered in other European countries within the next few years. In 2005, then-President Vladimir Putin tasked the authorities with bringing down road deaths to 23,000 before 2012, three to five times the average European level. Nevertheless, it would be a significant improvement over the early 1990s, when 35,000 to 37,000 people were killed in motor-vehicle accidents every year, even in that era of fewer cars.

I OWN THE ROAD

It is in the big cities, where traffic slows to 10 to 20 kph during rush hours, that congestion and bad habits create the highest risk.

"In major cities, especially in Moscow, traffic is a real pain in the neck," Viktor Kiryanov, chief of the traffic police, told reporters in March.

Pedestrians, moving off the sidewalk to get around cars parked there, are often hit.

"There are no conditions for pedestrians. They take to the road because they don't want to wipe vehicles with their trousers and skirts," Fyodorov said.

But at the same time, as in so much of Russian life, senior officials enjoy excellent road conditions. They may legally equip their cars with emergency lights so that other vehicles must yield to them. In 2006, the government limited the number of officials eligible to use the lights to 1,000. More than half of the permits went to the Federal Security Service, the Federal Guard Service, and the Interior Ministry. The Presidential Administration was given the right to use emergency lights on 60 vehicles and the government, 35.

Lower-ranking officials have special license plates that help them in traffic. Businesspeople who want to drive faster in congested traffic buy these plates illegally for $10,000 to $30,000.

A vehicle equipped with emergency lights or bearing a special license plate may defy the rules, such as using the oncoming lane to get around jams. Such cars are 12 times more likely to cause an accident than ordinary ones, according to police statistics.

Last fall, a vehicle escorting Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev crossed into oncoming traffic and rammed into a Lada, killing its driver.

In February, a vehicle carrying the traffic police chief, using an oncoming lane to get around a Moscow traffic jam, hit a woman, who suffered a fractured leg and concussion. She was later found guilty of causing the accident by crossing the street in the wrong place and failing to yield to a police vehicle with flashing lights.

The Moscow Times reports:

When Moscow photographer Serge Golovach decided to present portraits of beautiful women for an HIV/AIDS awareness project, he was revealing a startling truth about AIDS in Russia today -- it is quickly becoming a problem with a woman's face.

At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in Russia, those infected were predominantly male. Unlike in much of the rest of the world, the vast majority of AIDS cases in Russia and the CIS were the result of intravenous drug use -- a behavior usually associated with men. But of the 415,000 people infected with AIDS in Russia today, 135,000 of them -- 32 percent -- are women, according to the latest figures from the Federal Consumer Protection Service. A higher percentage of cases among women can be found only in Moldova or in African countries. In Moscow, the situation is even worse. Out of the 28,000 cases of HIV registered in Moscow as of January 2008, more than a half were women -- up 14 percent from last year, according to the Moscow branch of the consumer protection service. More disturbing, most of the newly infected women are young and in their best reproductive years, from ages 20 to 29. Around 5,000 of these women found out that they were infected while undergoing blood tests as part of prenatal care.

The ongoing feminization of the AIDS epidemic in Russia will no doubt affect the health and future of the nation. An increasing number of HIV-positive children born to these women are the predictable result. But there remains the disturbing question of why more Russian women are becoming part of this epidemic. Experts say it is a result of both the changing nature of HIV transmission in Russia and changes in gender-based social norms and sexual customs. While officials say intravenous drug use remains the main way of transmitting the virus, contracting HIV as a result of heterosexual intercourse is rising. The Moscow AIDS Center's web site says 86 percent of new cases of HIV are the result of intercourse. This change suggests that HIV is now affecting the general population rather than the marginalized elements of society, such as prostitutes or drug addicts, who have long been considered at high risk for acquiring HIV.

Of course, it remains true that mass unemployment and economic insecurity in the depressed regions of Russia sometimes force women into commercial sex work, which contributes to the rising numbers of HIV-positive women. Surveys of regional Russian cities show that most sex workers are between the ages of 17 and 23 and that condom use among these prostitutes is erratic at best.

But what makes the changing situation alarming is that ordinary women are increasingly at risk in a country where sexual coercion and gender inequities are tolerated, and double standards make it acceptable for men to have multiple sexual partners. While using condoms could be a solution in many cases, condoms have traditionally been extremely unpopular among Russian men. This is especially the case among the segments of the population with lower income and educational levels, where HIV is spreading most rapidly. The economic dependency of some women on their husbands and sexual partners leaves them with little bargaining power when it comes to negotiating condom use.

"Some women suspect their husbands have many sexual partners but fear to be abandoned or beaten if they resist their husbands' sexual demands," says Maria Ivannikova, the head of the informational department of the nongovernmental association AIDS Information Service.

Since women are biologically more vulnerable to acquiring HIV, it is two to four times more likely that a woman will contract HIV from a man than a man from a woman. The explanation is that women have a large surface area of reproductive tissue that is exposed to their partner's secretions during intercourse, and semen infected with HIV typically contains a higher concentration of the virus than a woman's sexual secretions. Specialists say young women are especially at greater risk, because their reproductive organs are immature and more likely to tear during intercourse, specialists say. Women also face a high risk of acquiring other sexually transmitted diseases, which increases the risk of contracting HIV 10-fold when left untreated.

The female condom could be a solution, since it is the only safe and effective HIV prevention option available that is completely controlled by women, but at the moment the method is mostly unknown in Russia. And even when women are familiar with female condoms, they have a hard time finding them. Pharmacies do not stock them because of their relatively high cost and a lack of demand, according to Igor Peskarev, the director of Humanitarian Action, a UNAIDS partner NGO in St. Petersburg.

"You may find women's condoms only in sex shops in our city, and the price will be around 3 or 4 euros, more than 100 rubles. It's relatively expensive for a one-time use item," he said.

Microbicides, which can be applied in the vagina for the prevention of HIV and other STDs, are still in the developmental stage, although Russian scientists are working along with others around the world to develop an effective one.

Every day, more than 100 new cases of HIV appear in Russia, and if current trends continue, women will soon make up a majority of the victims. And the fact that Russia is currently in the midst of a serious demographic crisis compounds the problem. According to data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the combination of falling birth rates and rising death rates from chronic and infectious disease means that by 2025, Russia's population will fall from about 144 million to about 125 million. Add to that 5 million to 15 million excess deaths from AIDS, and the country may lose 20 percent of its citizens over the next 20 years.

In an attempt to raise awareness of this problem and help lift the stigma of people with AIDS, UNAIDS recruited 25 famous women from Russia and Ukraine who agree to be photographed. By displaying the photographs of women who are well-known and in the news, the organization hopes encourage both public and private discussions about HIV/AIDS, particularly among women. The exhibit, which will run for two weeks in Moscow, will then tour the country, and a selection of the photographs will be published as a 2009 calendar to be launched on Dec. 1, World AIDS Day.

Richard Lourie, writing in the Moscow Times:

In February, Boris Nemtsov published a white paper on the Vladimir Putin years that he considered so inflammatory that he suspended his membership in Union of Right Forces, the party he co-founded, to spare it the Kremlin's ire. Nemtsov, the former boy-wonder governor of Nizhny Novgorod and first deputy prime minister in 1997 and 1998, wrote the 75-page essay with Vladimir Milov, a former deputy energy minister, in 2002.

All Russian bookstores have reportedly refused to carry the book, whose title has been variously translated as "Putin: The Results" and "Putin: The Bottom Line." It is available in Russian and English on the blog of La Russophobe.

After a one-paragraph review of Russia's success -- "true but only the lesser part of the truth" -- the authors launch into an unremitting assault on the crimes, follies and failures of the Putin administration. The central failure was not using the oil windfall to modernize the country's economy, army, health care, education and infrastructure.

Authoritarianism only brought corruption on a colossal scale -- $300 billion a year. Transparency International ranks Russia 143rd on its Corruption Perceptions Index, along with Gambia and Togo. The authors' analysis of the larceny under Putin is sharp, detailed and convincing. They do not hesitate to call his a "criminal system of government."

Meanwhile Russia is dying out. Men can expect to live less than 59 years ("I'm officially dead," a Russian friend said to me on turning 60). The annual numbers are bad -- car accidents (33,000), murder (30,000) and suicide (57,000). Drinking, smoking, poor diet and the lamentable health care system polish off even more.

The justice system obeys the Kremlin, causing "the collapse of the idea of the supremacy of the law" (never very widespread in Russia if the truth be told). The Constitution has been "trampled into the dust." The infrastructure is in dire straights, endangering economic progress (Finland has more paved road).

The report's own weakness lies in its off-putting tone and its too-general suggestions. The tone is too dark, every problem is a crisis. Understatement was always alien to the intelligentsia.

The report offers very little in the way of practical suggestions. Something more than exhortations can reasonably be expected from men with their political experience. How to build a decent "successful, European" Russia is, they say, "perfectly clear. First and foremost, the police state has to be dismantled and human dignity returned to the people." You could hardly think of a more unobjectionable statement, except perhaps to the people running the police state in question.

They authors do, however, at times propose useful solutions to pressing problems. For example, they point out that it makes more sense to encourage middle-class people to have more children by writing down mortgage debt at government expense than to encourage the "lumpen proletariats" to reproduce by offering cash awards to "hero mothers" who produce large numbers of offspring.

The authors' list of Russia's problems contains no great surprises. And just as we can guess pretty much in advance what a New York liberal will think of U.S. President George W. Bush, we can do the same for what a Moscow liberal will think of Putin. But there is one subject where the authors came up with some surprising, even shocking conclusions -- the fear of China. They accuse Putin of conducting "capitulatory" policies -- arming the enemy and making "major territorial concessions." In time, China will demand much more, claiming that tsarist treaties were unequal and unjust.

"China represents a real threat to our country," they say, calling Putin a "Chinese agent of influence." I have heard similar sentiments from highly placed political figures with whom Nemtsov and Milov would otherwise have nothing in common. Perhaps in the absence of ideology all that can unite Russia now is love of money and fear of China.

Reuters reports:

Before grumbling about rising movie ticket prices in the United States, consider a trip to the multiplex in Russia.

The recent Matthew McConaughey movie "Fool's Gold" is playing at Moscow's 11-screen Oktyabr Cinema for 300 rubles per ticket -- that's $12.70. [LR: In a country with an average wage of $4 per hour, a Russian needs to work for three hours to pay for a single movie ticket; a whole day's wages would be needed to pay for a date]. Stick around for the later showing of the horror film "Shutter," which is running only in Oktyabr's 35-seat VIP room, and the price jumps to 1,200 rubles ($51).

A night out at the movies or the occasional theater seats might require budget-balancing in the West. But that same escapism is becoming a luxury item in Russia, where out-of-home entertainment can eat up a sizable portion of the average wage of the working class and those on retirement incomes. "Certainly, there is a segment of the Russian population that is left out of entertainment because of the price," says Maria Lipman, analyst at the Carnegie Moscow Center, which studies public policy issues.

But even as Russia spawns a growing middle class and disposable income increases of about 10% each year, the average net monthly wage translates to $524 per month and the average monthly pension to $130.The increasing prices aren't limited to Moscow's entertainment industry; the city was named the most expensive in Europe two years running, according to Mercer Human Resource Consulting. At the same time, PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that the average price of a movie ticket in Russia was 101 rubles ($4.12) in 2006. Today, Moscow prices range anywhere from 150 rubles-500 rubles ($6.12-$20). And for "event" movies, ticket prices often are hiked during the first two weeks in release. In Moscow, prices also can vary depending on the time of day or whether it's a weekend showing.

Leonid Ogorodnikov, CEO of Russia's largest movie chain, Caro Film, explains the variance in cost as the price of ensuring quality. "There are theaters in which prices don't go up on weekends and holidays, but these are old cinemas that don't guarantee quality presentation, sound, service, etc.," he says. "These are attended by moviegoers who aren't ready to pay for a quality film screening."

Kirill Ivanov, vp operations and development at Cinema Park, Russia's fourth-largest exhibitor, chalks up the expensive ticket prices to extremely high rental rates for cinemas in Russian shopping centers. "If before this concerned only Moscow and to a certain extent St. Petersburg, now the rental rates in small cities are just through the roof," he says.

But Sergei Lavrov, box office analyst at Russia Film Business Today, places the responsibility for high ticket prices squarely on the shoulders of the film business. "With so little regulation in this country, distributors can do whatever they like," he says.

Although reserved seating is becoming increasingly common in Europe and the U.S., tickets in Russia are divided into economy and VIP categories. Some theaters even set aside halls with much smaller capacity, with tickets selling for as high as three or four times the usual admission rates. If prices are beyond your reach, don't even think about heading out to a Moscow nightclub. A booth can cost as much as $12,000 in some hot spots.

Most Russians don't know that sickening feeling of driving on a lonely road and realizing that you are running on empty, about to run out of gas and be stranded all alone. They don't know it because, with an average wage of $4/hour, they can't afford to buy a car (Russia does not rank in the top 55 nations of the world in automobiles per capita, Mexico for instance has far more; likewise, Russia is not in the world's top 50 countries ranked for per capita purchasing power GDP) -- and even if they could, the spiking price of gasoline at the pump would preclude them from using it. That's to say nothing of the horrifying prospect of dealing with corrupt police officials at virtually every intersection, or Russia's horrific rate of highway fatalities -- Russian roads are among the most dangerous in the world.

It's quite strange, of course, to read that Russians are being oppressed by the rising cost of gasoline, since Russia is a world leader in oil production. One would think that at least one benefit of living in Russia would be cheap gas. But in fact, we've previously reported on how Russian oil production is falling off fast. Those who hope that Russia can replenish its production by developing offshore fields may be barking up the wrong oil derrick. The energy industry trade publication Upstream Online (hat tip: Robert Amsterdam) reported on April 18th:

Russia needs 61 trillion rubles ($2.6 trillion) of investment to develop offshore oil and gas deposits, Rosneft boss Sergei Bogdanchikov has claimed. Exploration alone of offshore regions until 2050 will cost 16 trillion rubles and production 45 trillion rubles more, Bogdanchikov told reporters and government officials in Moscow today.

UpstreamOnline also reports:

Russian gas giant Gazprom has booked a a worse than predicted 20% fall in second-quarter net profit, blaming lower sales in Europe and higher operating costs. Net profit fell to 113 billion roubles ($4.62 billion), to International Financial Reporting Standards, from 141 billion roubles in the same period last year and below the average of 129 billion roubles in a Reuters poll of 11 analysts. Revenue rose 5% to 532 billion roubles, in line with forecasts, but the bottom line was hurt by high operating expenses, which jumped 18% year-on-year to 390 billion roubles. Gazprom's total long-term borrowings, including affiliates, rose to 1.105 trillion roubles from 806 billion roubles at the end of 2006.

So Russian gas and oil fields are running dry, trillions are needed to refurbish them, and Gazprom is deep in debt, unable to provide such funds. Blogger Tim Newman of White Sun of the Desert, who works in the Russian energy sector, adds:

The $2.6 trillion required by Gazprom and Rosneft is only that amount needed to develop Russia's offshore fields. The onshore developments will need separate funding, as in Upstream Online tells us: "Gazprom Neft, which expects Gazprom to hand over the right to develop all of Gazprom's 11 oilfields within the next two to three years, has said it plans to invest up to $4 billion per year to 2020, or around $50 billion, to boost output." $4bn per year is one hell of a lot of money for a single company to invest in oil and gas projects, if not much beside the $62bn per year that they say they are going to have to come up with to develop the offshore fields. Bear this in mind next time you hear about Gazprom investing in trans-saharan pipelines, Libya, and Nigeria. Despite the political rhetoric and talks of the massive potential and influence of Gazprom, it is Russia's most indebted company. In other words, Gazprom is unlikely to be in much of a position to be financing mega-projects any time soon, and if it is going to sink billions into places like Africa, having never run a major project on home soil let alone in a political minefield like Nigeria, Russians might be waiting a while for their offshore gas receipts.

If the #1 best indicator of the total failure of the Putin administration in Russia is the country's rapidly declining population (Putin's policies are wiping out Russians with Hitlerian efficiency), then surely the second-best sign is the decimation of Russia's energy sector. Russia could, of course, solicit foreign investment to provide the needed sums, but then it would have to share the profits and the control, and it's currently in the process of enacting legislation to make this illegal out of pure neo-Soviet paranoia. The Kremlin imagines that it can simply bleed the nation white, just as was done in Soviet times, using the funds from oil and gas proceeds not to develop the nation or even the energy sector, but to wage a new cold war with the West. Meanwhile, just as in Soviet times, the energy sector and the people themselves get sicker and sicker until finally there is a massive collapse.

Speaking at Harvard University in November 2006 Martin Dewhirst, an Oxford-trained Russia scholar who during the Cold War mixed lecturing at the University of Glasgow with translation work for Radio Liberty in Munich, said of Putin's Russia:

"To call it post-Soviet Russia is a little bit premature. Neo-Soviet Russia might be a more appropriate term." He said he was glad Andrei Sakharov died in 1989. The nuclear physicist who personified anti-Soviet dissent, said Dewhirst, "would have died of a broken heart in the 1990s." Post-Soviet" does not convey the right perception to either scholars or to a reading public outside Russia, said Dewhirst, who prefers the retrograde power of the term "neo-Soviet."

Marina Khazanov, who teaches Russian in the Department of Modern Languages at Boston University, disagreed: "If it's a neo-Soviet regime, there is no hope. And there is hope." She pointed to "completely free" newspapers still publishing, and to Russian movies and literature free of Soviet-style repression. One must wonder if, two years later, Ms. Khazanov still thinks so, and indeed whether she now worries that she contributed, in her small way, to delaying opposition to the neo-Soviet state, helping it consolidate power.

Russia replaced the USSR after the most recent collapse. What will replace Russia after the coming one?