Vladimir Socor, writing in the Jamestown Foundations Eurasia Daily Monitor on May 1st:

Russia is escalating the challenge to Georgia and the West in Abkhazia, now with military action. This follows President Vladimir Putin’s April 16 decree, authorizing direct official relations between Russian government bodies and the secessionist authorities in Georgia's Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions (see EDM, April 18). That unilateral move amounted to official “legal” recognition in terms of Russian law, formalizing Russia’s de facto annexation policy in the two territories.

That move is now being followed up with overt militarization and cross-border acts of aggression in Abkhazia.

On April 20 a Russian MIG-29 fighter plane shot down a Georgian unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle (UAV) over the Gali district in southern Abkhazia, deep inside the internationally recognized Georgian territory and airspace. The Israeli-made, Georgian-operated UAV is an unarmed drone, merely a flying photographic and video camera, used by Georgia‘s Internal Affairs Ministry to ascertain Russian military movements in Abkhazia. The drone transmitted in real time the images of the Russian plane approaching and firing an air-to-air missile at the UAV. Posted by Georgian authorities on you.tube, the film corroborates Georgian radar data tracking that same MIG-29 as it gained altitude over the Russian-held Gudauta military airfield, flying over the Gali district and then turning north into Russian airspace. Georgia immediately proposed to Russia to exchange radar and any other data on the incident. As of April 30 the Russian side had not responded (Georgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statements, April 21, 26, 30; Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs statement, April 29).

Moscow claims that any one of the new NATO member countries with residual MIG inventories might have staged the incident in order to provoke Russia. Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov told this tale to the European Union during high-level meetings on overall EU-Russia relations on April 29 and 30 in Luxemburg (Interfax, April 29, 30). This claim brings a slight variation to the master theme that Georgia fires at Georgian targets in order to then accuse Russia, as Moscow insisted after the Russian air attacks in March and August 2007 over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, respectively.

Unwittingly contradicting Moscow‘s version of the April 20 incident, Abkhaz authorities were quick to claim that they had themselves shot down the Georgian UAV (Apsnypress, April 21). Although inherently absurd, this claim could have prompted international inquiries to Russia about its illegal arms deliveries to Abkhaz proxy forces, inside the internationally recognized Georgian territory. Such inquiries have not been made, however.

By shooting down the UAV, Moscow almost certainly aimed to reduce Georgian (and, by implication, Western) ability to monitor the next Russian military moves into Abkhazia, which have been underway since at least April 29. On that date Russian convoys of artillery, armored vehicles, and additional troop units crossed the internationally recognized Russia-Georgia border at the Psou River, into the secessionist territory. Moscow has announced that its troops opened and are manning a number of new “border checkpoints” on what Moscow describes as a Russian-Abkhazian border, which is actually the Russian-Georgian border in international law (Interfax, April 29, 30).

Moscow claims -- as Lavrov told the EU in the Luxemburg meeting -- to be “preventing bloodshed” and “protecting Russia’s citizens” in Abkhazia, in response to Georgian troop deployments allegedly in the upper Kodori Valley. The United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), however, indirectly refuted that accusation by announcing that it had not observed any such Georgian troop deployments. UNOMIG is monitoring the area, alongside Russia’s own “peacekeeping” troops. On the whole, Moscow portrays its latest military moves as an increase in its “peacekeeping” operation. Russia did not prenotify, let alone request consent from, the legally sovereign Georgian government or any international organization.

These moves violate multiple international legal norms and specific agreements. Russia’s “peacekeeping” operation is nominally a Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) operation, an illusion accepted for convenience by the UN. Although this cover does not make the Russian operation a legal one in any sense (the CIS has no authority to mandate peacekeeping operations), any additions to the operation would necessitate approval by CIS countries’ heads of state, at least on paper. Aware that it could not muster such approval, Moscow has moved unilaterally, thus discrediting both the CIS in its purported peacekeeping role and the UN for its acceptance of that pretense.

Furthermore, Moscow is now openly erasing an internationally recognized border through military force. It also exacerbates its continuing breaches of the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) by augmenting the Russian heavy weaponry in Abkhazia, which is Georgian territory also from that treaty’s point of view. Russia has deployed “unaccounted-for treaty-limited equipment” (UTLE) in Abkhazia and other secessionist territories for the past decade, above treaty ceilings and beyond international verification. Some of that hardware -- as well as lighter weaponry and Russian personnel -- has been placed at the disposal of unlawful secessionist forces. Russia also holds onto the Gudauta base and is apparently using it, despite Moscow’s 1999 commitment to vacate the base by 2001.

International and Western organizations have, on the whole, tacitly tolerated Russian militarization measures in Abkhazia from the 1990s to date. These organizations and leading Western nations will risk their credibility if they continue such tolerance after Moscow‘s latest, overt acts of military aggression.

We here often refer to Russia as being neo-Soviet, but it's just as accurate to call Russia neo-Tsarist. In other words, a tiny ruling class of super-rich dominating and exploiting a vast unwashed underclass -- exactly the circumstances that led to the Bolshevik revolution. A commenter has it right: these people don't believe in anything except money -- and they are Russia's future! The Times of London documents this phenomenon horrifying chapter after repulsive verse:

It’s 3am on a Friday along a narrow Moscow canal behind the House on the Embankment, the sprawling apartment block built under Stalin for the Communist party nomenklatura, where the purges began. Chauffeur-driven black Hummers, BMWs with tinted windows and at least one Lamborghini crawl along the canal, past guards in dark suits and earpieces to reach the entrance of Rai – Paradise – a popular nightclub among Moscow’s wealthy teenagers.

Inside, the scene is one of pure hedonism – Moscow style – brash, unabashed, gaudy and ostentatious. Long-legged models covered in body paint pose topless next to a Formula One car on show for the night, a few steps from a dozen oversized Fabergé eggs on sale for £2,000 a piece. Perfectly sculpted dancing girls covered only in baby oil and tiny bikinis gyrate on the bar overlooking a packed dance floor.

Rising above are the club’s private lodges. The cheapest – a cramped cubicle for six – costs £1,200 for the night. The VIP, a kitsch affair with its own back room and shower, can be hired for £5,500 – drinks included. On this night, all lodges are taken – one by Andrei, the son of a wealthy businessman, who is celebrating his 17th birthday with friends; his driver and bodyguard kill time watching a DVD in a Mercedes outside.

In the midst of a haze of smoke, bright laser beams and sparkler sticks, Andrei and his school mates are puffing on water pipes and knocking back vodka shots and mojitos. One of his girlfriends, who looks barely 18 and is wearing a see-through top, fishnet tights and diamond earrings, is drinking champagne and picking strawberries from a giant fruit platter. “Life is great,” shouts Andrei over the loud music, as a throng of very young women and older men dance below. “Look at this! It’s Rai! What better place to be than in Moscow? We have it all. It’s the best place in the world to party. If you have money, of course. But that’s not a problem.”

As if on cue, a Russian pop song with the lyrics zhizni udalas (life’s worked out well) comes on. The crowd goes so wild that security has to remove two young girls. But it’s later, by the bar, that I find an even more poignant way to sum up the Moscow of the zolotoya molodezh (the golden youth). An attractive young blonde, sipping a cocktail, wears a white T-shirt with a warning emblazoned across her cleavage: “No yacht. No plane. No money. No chance.”

Moscow is booming. According to the Russian edition of Forbes, there are now 110 dollar billionaires in Russia, with more in Moscow than in any other city in the world. When it comes to private fortunes, only America has more tycoons than Russia. Add over 100,000 multimillionaires and you get a sense of the wealth that has been accumulated in Russia – all in little over 16 years since the collapse of communism. Arguably, no other country has ever given birth to such private riches in so short a time.

The oligarchs, the hungry young Soviet men who first set out in the treacherous world of post-communist business and built multi-billion-dollar empires, have long come of age. Most have children, and this being a country where people marry – and often divorce – earlier, as a rule their offspring are no toddlers. Take Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea FC and Russia’s third richest man, who is said to be worth over £12 billion. At 41 he has five children – the eldest is in her mid-teens.

Twenty years after Abramovich first set out in business selling rubber ducks, Russia is experiencing a new social phenomenon in its post-tsarist history – the growth of its first generation to have been born or raised rich.

These children live far more opulent, secluded and bizarre lives than moneyed kids in other countries. This is not only because such private fabulous wealth is new to Russia since the Bolsheviks murdered its aristocracy in 1917, but also because, for now at least, money means little in Russia unless it is shamelessly flaunted.

With the credo of communism long defunct, the brash and swift accumulation of wealth is the new ideology, the new value system, the new religion. Despised and denounced for 70 years as the root of all evil, capitalism has been embraced in Russia with the fervent passion of the neophyte. But the dramatic shift is now leading to some disquiet about the wellbeing of Russia’s zolotoya molodezh. Privileged, fantastically wealthy and well connected, are these rich kids the future ruling class of Russia? And if so, how will they differ from their Soviet-born parents?

“The question we should be asking is whether we are turning our children into spineless, fragile creatures who live in a fantasy world that has nothing to do with reality, with the Russia beyond our walled compounds,” said the wife of a multimillionaire businessman, mother of two and rare voice of dissent among the rich, who is also a successful entrepreneur in her own right.

“I have little doubt that many rich kids will either be in rehab or addicted to a shrink by the time they reach their mid-twenties. I do all I can to make sure mine won’t; ultimately, the parents are to blame. If you give a child everything one could possibly imagine, how can it learn to fight for anything, to be ambitious, to have drive?”

For Russia’s fast-growing community of nouveaux riches, sending their children to an English boarding school is becoming as essential as owning a villa in Sardinia and a yacht in the Caribbean. But for most, the road to Eton, Harrow and Winchester begins at the Moscow Economic School (Mes).

Founded only 15 years ago, Mes is the most elite primary and secondary school in Russia. It may not be the best, but it is by far the most popular among Moscow’s ruling classes. To send a child there is to make a statement. To get a place is to be accepted in a club. After all, this is where Abramovich’s children went to school, as did Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s, once Russia’s richest man, who is now serving a lengthy jail sentence in Siberia as a punishment for angering the Kremlin. The offspring of Pyotr Aven, one of Russia’s first oligarch bankers, who are now in England, are also former students.

Oleg Deripaska, Russia’s richest man – worth about £14 billion – who turned 40 in January, has a child at Mes, as does Tatyana Dyachenko, daughter of the late Boris Yeltsin. The list, which includes children of top Kremlin officials, is long. Entry costs £25,000, although parents are said to pay far more to get their child in. Average yearly fees are around £7,000 – a pittance for any self-respecting wealthy Russian and a fraction of what it later costs to send them to Britain. The key here, say parents of Mes children, is connections, as getting a place without the right recommendation is all but impossible.

September 1 marks the beginning of the school year in Russia. Known as the Day of Knowledge, it is an important date in the country’s calendar, when parents, teachers and children come together to celebrate education.

As in Soviet times, children wear their best outfit and bring teachers flowers. Girls wear colourful ribbons in their hair and carry balloons. Teachers make warm speeches in front of parents armed with cameras and camcorders. The climax comes when a pupil is chosen to ring the year’s first school bell.

A special occasion in every Russian school, September 1 is quite a spectacle at Mes. A traffic jam worth millions of dollars stretches for several hundred yards around the school, as Porsche Cayenne after Maserati after BMW limo roll up, 4WD chase cars with bodyguards in tow, to deliver their precious little cargos. Burly security men, some armed with guns, others just with umbrellas to protect their masters from the drizzle, jump out as car doors are swung open to allow school children as young as seven to make their entrance. Some carry presents, others struggle with oversized flower arrangements.

All are immaculately dressed in designer clothes. For girls, the larger the ribbon, the better.

As a chauffeur-driven car with smoked windows and the blue flashing lights reserved for government officials drives off, there is a slight moment of panic as a child realises that she has left her balloons behind. Her father dispatches a bodyguard, who seconds later sprints back into the school, pistol strapped to his side, balloons in hand. As the last children enter the school, bodyguards and drivers mingle outside and settle in for a long wait.

“Once during the festivities teachers lined up the year’s new entries on stage and asked them to introduce themselves in front of everyone on a microphone,” recalls Alina Pavlova, whose nine-year-old goes to Mes and is now spending a week in the Maldives.

“Then they asked each child to tell us how they’d spent the summer holidays. One said Sardinia, another St Tropez, a third the Caribbean, on private yachts of course. I must say that it sounded a bit strange, coming from the mouths of a bunch of seven-year-olds.”

To find out more about Mes I meet Masha, the 13-year-old daughter of a government official who, like most high-ranking Russian state bureaucrats, also has his own lucrative business on the side. Far from being a typical spoilt rich kid, she is shy, soft-spoken and well mannered, but it quickly becomes apparent that despite her young age, privilege and fabulous luxury have long become second nature.

She tells me that the next morning, the start of her spring break, she is to be taken to the airport in a chauffeur-driven car to fly off to a large yacht in the Bahamas with a school friend and her parents. “Will you fly first class?” I ask naively. “Oh no, by private plane,” she says with the nonchalance my daughter would reserve to describe an afternoon at her local playground.

Masha’s friend, the daughter of a Russian industrialist, once threw a tantrum because she did not like a private jet her parents hired to go on holiday. I’m told it was a phase she has grown out of, with the help of a child psychologist.

At Mes since she turned seven, Masha explained that the most common aspiration among her school girlfriends is to marry a multimillionaire, a marked change from Soviet times when officially girls wanted to become a doctor or an engineer but secretly dreamt of being an actress, then the epitome of glamour.

Of course, not every child at Mes flaunts Daddy’s wealth, and many behave like ordinary children. But, as Masha explained, every class has its own clique of kids na pantkah (show-offs). “There are strict rules if you want to be accepted by them,” said Masha. “The first must is expensive designer clothes. At school it’s absolutely normal for a 13-year-old to carry a Gucci or Prada handbag, wear high-heels and make-up. A watch studded with precious stones is also imperative. Most kids have credit cards and at least a couple of e100 bills in their wallet. And of course, everyone has a mobile, preferably an iPhone. A private nanny, bodyguards and a bulletproof car are also very common.”

To celebrate his son’s 14th birthday two years ago, a Ukrainian tycoon dispatched his private jet to Moscow, boarded his son’s whole Mes class and flew them to Kiev for the weekend. They stayed in suites in the city’s most expensive five-star hotel and took a cruise down the Dnieper river on a private yacht. The boy’s father could not join them as he was in jail at the time.

Under pressure to impress each other with ever more extravagant shows of wealth, parents can pay tens of thousands of pounds for a child’s birthday party, for instance by hiring an entire circus company for entertainment. Typically these families live off Rublyovo-Uspenskoye Shosse, a road that snakes westwards out of Moscow through forests of silver birches and pines. Known as Rublyovka, the area is Moscow’s Beverly Hills, home to the gated compounds of oligarchs, government ministers, Kremlin officials, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and, from this week, his successor, Dmitry Medvedev. Along the road, stretches of forest are boxed in behind 16ft-high metal fences surveilled by CCTV cameras and patrolled day and night by private security guards.

Where once open countryside stretched, dotted with crumbling dachas, now rises the Barvikha Luxury Village, an elite shopping complex just down the road from Putin’s dacha. Lamborghini and Ferrari have a showroom. The Bentley dealership is said to sell a car a day. Gucci, Prada and Armani are there, as is Dolce & Gabbana, with a VIP fitting room decorated in mink. Close by is an upmarket restaurant from where Arianna, a 15-year-old Rublyovka child, used to have sushi delivered daily to her school because she didn’t like the canteen food.

Further down, where the road reaches Moscow, I once saw two small children gently cruising down the pavement in their own pedal cars – a Ferrari and a Porsche – two bodyguards in dark suits and a nanny walking briskly behind.

According to Boris Arkhipov, a professor of child psychology, the lavish lifestyle is causing Russia’s rich kids to be susceptible to a number of psychological problems. Arkhipov worked as a consultant for about 10 years at Mes and other elite high schools, meeting and observing the children of some of Russia’s richest oligarchs.

“The problem is that in many cases the parents have little culture other than the culture of money,” said Arkhipov. “Children learn from the parents. If their father swears at his staff, why shouldn’t they do the same with their nanny and bodyguard? Discipline for many is a problem. They don’t accept authority. They live in a gilded cage, with staff but often without enough love from their parents who are too busy running their business empires and having a good time. They have a different sense of what reality is.

“But the greatest and most common problem is that they have little drive. What’s the point of striving to achieve something when you are born with a silver spoon in your mouth and everything is served for you on a golden platter?”

Other sociologists describe the Rublyovka’s little residents as “the children from behind the fences”. They warn that the lavishness and seclusion of their lives means they will find it hard to adapt to the real world with its problems, as they have little or no contact with children from different backgrounds.

Arkhipov said that at school children often play on their mobile or Game Boy during classes, and complain to their powerful parents when the gadgets are confiscated by teachers. To illustrate the manipulative behaviour of some of the children he came across, he recalled one incident at Mes when a teenage schoolgirl threw herself into the arms of a teacher who gave her poor marks while a friend captured the moment on his phone. He said that the compromising frame led to a complaint and the teacher’s sacking.

“Once, the mother of a girl who was starting out at Mes demanded to know the names of the boys in her daughter’s class because, as she put it, she wanted to make sure she found herself a rich husband early on,” said Arkhipov. “The biggest problems are often among the children of the less wealthy. They’re rich but not oligarchs. They feel greater pressure to fit in, to catch up with the kids whose daddy has a private jet.”

Pressure or not, there is little doubt that off and around Rublyovka, parents take great pride in teaching their children to develop expensive tastes from very early on. Recently attending a private dinner of well-heeled Russians, I saw the toddler daughter of one of Russia’s 10 richest billionaires being spoon-fed black caviar – which, to be fair, is much cheaper here than in London.

Another time, I was struck by the acute fashion sense of a friend’s eight-year-old who lives in a compound off Rublyovka when she politely asked her mother if she could borrow her black Prada handbag to go to a musical premiere in the Kremlin. On another special occasion I saw her wearing a Chanel pearl necklace. I recently came across pictures of a gold-plated child’s swing.

Abramovich’s children must have become accustomed to holidaying on Pelorus, the tycoon’s 377ft yacht – and according to reports he is soon to add the 550ft Eclipse to his fleet of big yachts. With an estimated price tag of £200m, Eclipse, which is said to have two helipads and to be nearing its first sea trial, will hold the record as the world’s largest private yacht.

Abramovich and his family also fly in style. The billionaire’s largest private plane is a converted Boeing 737, originally designed to seat 360 people. The contrast between the tycoon’s childhood and that of his offspring could not be greater, as Abramovich was orphaned as a toddler and raised by an uncle in the inhospitable Siberian region of Komi, known only for its natural resources and Soviet-era gulags.

The same goes for Mikhail Fridman, now Russia’s seventh richest man (£10.4 billion) and father of two daughters, who as a student barely had enough money to buy clothes – when, as he once recalled, the height of glamour was a video machine smuggled into the Soviet Union by the well-connected father of a fellow student.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s first business venture was a dingy student cafe at Moscow University, and Oleg Deripaska, who grew up with his grandparents after his mother handed him over to them at an early age, saw their home seized by the state when they died. They are not exceptions: many Russian billionaires tell fabulous rags-to-riches stories. Children of the Soviet nomenklatura, of course, lived privileged existences, in spacious apartments and dachas far away from the communal flats of the proletariat, fed on goods their parents bought in shops reserved exclusively for the great and good of the party, and attending the best schools. But one has to hark back to tsarist times to find anything like the lavish excesses of today’s zolotoya molodezh.

If there is one common trait among most of Russia’s 110 billionaires and their poorer multimillionaires, it must be icy determination. Unlike their children who inherited their wealth, these are people who built their fortunes during the ruthless and deadly dangerous times of Russia’s early “biziness”, when rivals were taken care of by contract killers and only the smartest, most cunning and best connected came out on top.

Since fortunes were built in record time, often through shady deals born out of the absence of law, one can insinuate much about Russia’s tycoons – but not that they lack drive or vision – two traits many of their children may find hard to fine-tune from their Rublyovka cocoons. Take Dmitry, the wealthy former boyfriend of Olga, an aspiring fashion journalist who is part of the rich kids’ toussovka – as Moscovites call the in-crowd. “He was just 17 when I was going out with him,” she said. “Whenever he wanted to see a film, he’d hire an entire cinema theatre, just for the two of us, because he didn’t want other people there. I once asked him what he aspired to. The latest Mercedes is all he could answer.”

Or think of one of Olga’s girlfriends, who at 17 does not know how to wash and style her hair because she always goes to the hairdresser. And another friend, whose father rented the Rai club for £40,000 to celebrate her 18th birthday, an occasion she marked by wearing a specially made £60,000 dress covered in precious stones.

Most of Olga’s friends, she explains, have been clients of Moscow’s beauty salons since the age of 13 – boys too, who apparently are keen on facials and manicures. They are chauffeured around town in the latest Land Rover or, as in the case of one friend, a Bentley. They recently expressed relief at the introduction of the 5,000-ruble note (£100) as it has blessed them with more wallet space. They think Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana are cool, but not as cool as Brioni, the Italian fashion house whose custom-tailored suits can cost up to £15,000, or Bottega Veneta, where a handbag can set you back £10,000.

They ski in Courchevel and swim off yachts in Sardinia and St Tropez, have never been in the Moscow metro, and rent out an entire mansion for the weekend if they feel like throwing a party. Oh, and some young girls Olga knows believe snorting cocaine is a good way to keep thin.

“The rich kids I have as friends are all good people,” said Olga. “They’re kind and generous and open-hearted. But they’re full of problems and periodically suffer bouts of depression and severe apathy. The reason is simple. They have everything but haven’t achieved anything. And they are sufficiently intelligent to know what that means. They have no goal in life and that’s enough to make anyone unhappy. I call them the dyetiovoshi, the vegetable kids.”

As I leave Rai, walking away from the line of flash cars heading for the club, I tell myself that, as with many other things in Russia, after the dramatic social, political and economic changes of the past 20 years, it will take at least a generation for things to settle, fall into place and become less extreme.

Friends say that already some smart billionaire parents are expressing serious concerns about their children’s upbringing and are introducing stricter boundaries. And other rich parents I’ve met have not turned their children into brats even though they raise them in luxury.

As I reach the end of the canal, I can’t imagine a more unlikely backdrop to the hedonism of Rai than the House on the Embankment. This was once the top address for Stalin’s elites and their families and consequently the place from where they began to vanish, headed for Siberia, when his paranoia reached fever pitch; the building where generals and party leaders who knew their time had come would go to bed in their shoes, ready to be taken away by the secret police in the latest night-time arrests.

Seventy years later, as Moscow’s rich kids party hard into the wee hours of the morning, it is clear that some will one day go on to lead the world of Russian business and politics while others are almost certainly destined for luxury rehab clinics. Either way, however, they are highly unlikely to share the fate of many of their once-privileged forefathers who lived down the road. So, after all, some things do change.

Via referral from Dave Essel here is one of the world's leading athiests, Christopher Hitchens, columnist for Vanity Fair, writing in the Journal of the Council for Secular Humanism.

Insufficient attention has been given to the role of religion in helping to impose and reinforce the largest and fastest-growing dictatorial system in the modern world. I am referring to Vladimir Putin's Russia. which is well on its way to becoming a one-party system to rival the former Communist one, with a police apparatus to match and a cult of personality as well. Such a system requires an ideological mask that is a little more sophisticated than sheer power and sheer greed, and has found it in the appeal to traditional Russian chauvinism. And which body has always been the loyal accomplice of traditional Russian chauvinism? Yes, you guessed right. The black-cowled phalanx of Russian Orthodox Christianity is back at the side of the new czar.

Most people know about this, if they know about it at all, because of the famous meeting between George Bush and Vladimir Putin where the latter wore his grandmother's crucifix and the former was so impressed that he decided that he had gazed into the depths of Putin's “soul”. I ridiculed this meeting on the assumption that Putin had thought our president pathetically easy to fool (and I do not by any means take this thought back). But, hypocrite though he probably is when it comes to crucifixes and clericaI regalia, the ex-KGB goon Putin nonetheless understands very well that a church-state Concordat is something from which both he and the priesthood could readily profit.

Several recent reports underline my point. Russian Orthodox clerics are back in the schoolrooms, inculcating innocent children into the idea that a “true” Russian is also a member or the national church. Since this bloodstained national church underwent the trauma of a schism during the Communist period, with the traditional establishment continuing to serve Stalin and the secular power (a fact that is very often forgotten or even denied) while an even more conservative minority decamped to New York and set up a rival authority, there have recently been reunification talks aimed at healing the breach. And Mr. Putin, of course, has been prominent in hosting these negotiations and in several other ways cementing the idea that he, his party, the nation, and the church are one.

This is a very dangerous, very nasty, state of affairs. Tens of millions of Russians are either unbelievers, non-Orthodox Christians of many denominations, Muslims, or Jews. Historically, Russian Orthodoxy was a brutal henchman of forced religious conformism within the borders of the state and played an unforgettable role in the persecution and murder of, in particular, the ,Jewish minority. The most famous achievement of this reactionary clerical establishment – the fabrication of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion – also had implications beyond Russia's frontiers. Spread by Orthodox White Russian priests and other émigrés after 1917, it became part of the ghastly energy of Nazism.

Today's revived Russian and Russian Orthodox chauvinism and authoritarianism has widely ramified implications. It was Russia that reached deep into Europe to help support Slobodan Milosevic's campaign of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, directed at Bosnian Muslims and Croatian Catholics, and it is Russia that still invokes this sinister Orthodox “brotherhood” with Serbia when the question of Kosovo's independence comes up at the councils of the European Union and the United Nations, In addition, when Russia seeks to influence or bully its former colonies in the Baltic or the Caucasus or in Eastern Europe, it is often the religious difference that is added to the nationalist one in order to intensify Putin's appeal to domestic xenophobia. (The Russian Orthodox don't really even want Roman Catholics, let alone Protestants, proselytizing in their territory, but, as I never tire of saying, just see how the Christians love each other.)

Secularists and infidels have become used to repeating that we are equally opposed to all three monotheisms, as indeed we are. But we sometimes forget that quarrels within these communities of bigotry, fanaticism. and stupidity can be just as dangerous as the original illusion itself. And while we have been focused on the obscurantism of the pope, the idiocies of the “Christian Coalition”, the madness of the Jewish settlers, and the ongoing hysteria of Islamism (which is undergoing its own interconfessional civil war), a specter that haunted the nineteenth century – the specter of Eastern Orthodox triumphalism – has also risen to trouble our sleep. The Parties of God never relax, and neither should we.

Paul Goble reports:

Only days after Russian officials celebrated an uptick in the number of births in that country in 2007, demographers there have warned that this much cited figure does not constitute a trend and that “the depopulation of Russia will accelerate,” a development that threatens its economy, its ability to field an army, and even its hold on its current territory. In the April 29th issue of Vedomosti, journalist Olga Kuvshina cites the views of the members of that expert community that Moscow’s upbeat projects are “unrealistic” and that “after 2012, the country will face a new and rapidly deepening demographic “crisis” those in denial are doing little to prevent. “From 1992 through 2007,” they note, “the difference in the number of deaths over births totaled 12 million people,” a figure whose enormity is obvious if one thinks that this means that in the first six years of this century, Russia annually lost the population of Novgorod oblast or Krasnodar kray. And the 2007 increase in the number of births was, Vladimir Arkhangel’sky, a demographer at Moscow State University, argues, the produce of the mini-baby boom in the 1980s, something that has not been repeated anytime since and means the size of the prime child bearing age group will plummet after about five years.

But what is especially critical is that these declines in the overall population will be exceeded by declines in the working age group, with the “cadre deficit” amount to 22 million total by 2020. And that in turn will “put under threat the development of the country,” especially since it represents a major shift from the past. “In the last several years, the overall decline in the number of the population has been accompanied by [what demographers call] a ‘demographic dividend’ – a growth in the number of working age people.” But beginning this year, that dividend disappears, and in the future, the country will have fewer workers relative to other age groups. Last year, there were 0.6 children and pensioners for every worker, but by 2025, that ratio will be 1 to 0.8 and by 2050, it will be one to one.” That is not a projection or estimate, the scholars insist: “’the people [being counted] are already born, and we know how many of them there will be.’” (The decline of Russia’s working-population is exacerbated by alcoholism and a rising tide of industrial accidents which this year killed 180,000 Russian workers and seriously injured more than 200,000 others, according to statistics published in Moscow’s Utro yesterday.)

Moreover, the demographers say, Russia will continue to lag behind countries at similar levels of economic development. Men in countries with similar GDPs per capita now live three to eleven years longer than in Russia, and women there live one to five years longer than Russian women. According to Anatoly Vishnevsky, a leading Moscow demographer, the Russian government’s projection that life expectancy in Russia will be 75 by 2025 is without foundation. And another demographer who works in Germany noted that life expectancy in other countries is increasing by 0.22 years annually, while “in Russia it is falling.” The “chief” causes of that, the demographers say, is “the low value of human life in the eyes of the [Russian] state … and of [Russian] society itself. … Every year, about 200,000 [Russians] die from preventable causes, of whom two thirds pass away because of insufficient medial and social support.” More than 425,000 die from alcoholism, and deaths from high blood pressure is 4.2 times higher in Russia than the average of 15 countries in the European Union, the U.S. and Japan. These are problems the Russian government, given its income from the sale of gas and oil, could address but has chosen not to.

Nonetheless, it is worth noting that this week, one branch of the Russian government decided to try to do something about this looming national tragedy: a new proposal has been taken up in the Duma that would increase the age for the legal purchase of alcohol from 18 to 21. That legislative step by itself will not reverse Russia’s demographic decline, but it is more significant than any now on offer by the Kremlin and the Russian executive branch more generally, both of which seem largely content to offer upbeat assessments very much at odds with unpleasant realities.

The JB Spins blog reviews the new film Refusnik:

Transitions Online reports:

One Sunday afternoon in the early days of spring, Dmitry Smekalov was taking a stroll in northern St. Petersburg. By chance he came across a protest rally by farmers and vendors who were campaigning against the closure of a local marketplace. Although he had nothing to do with the demonstration, Smekalov said he suddenly found himself face to face with a squad of riot police sent to disperse the protesters. The businessman, apparently mistaken for a protester, was grabbed and beaten by the squad and then, he alleges, thrown into the Neva River.

Smekalov said he fell onto the ice, suffering injuries to his ribs, but managed to crawl to the nearest steps and back onto the embankment. Smekalov believes that had the incident occurred a month or two later, after the ice has broken up, he might easily have drowned.

So shocked was Smekalov by the assault that he refused to be taken to the hospital, fearing he might suffer further harm there at the hands of police. Instead he sought treatment from private doctors. He has also been too scared to press charges, he said.

A police spokesman said he had heard about the claims but that the police never received a formal complaint from Smekalov.

But Smekalov's case has been taken up by St. Petersburg politician Sergei Gulyaev, one of the organizers of the market workers' rally who said he witnessed the assault on Smekalov. At one stage, he said, officers kicked Smekalov for nearly 10 minutes in a police van.

Worried about his condition, the politician later sought him out and heard the full story. Gulyaev's hope is that publicity about the case will help to prevent similar attacks in the future, but recent history is not encouraging on that score.

Severe police violence against peaceful street protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg over the past year has led to international criticism of President Vladimir Putin's government. But not a single police officer is known to have been disciplined or punished over the violence.

Many people have alleged that Russia's law enforcement staff are beyond the law in such matters, and human rights advocates across the country face long odds when they try to conduct their own investigations into such claims. A thick, seemingly impenetrable, cloud of secrecy seems to envelope what happens to a detainee during arrest, detention, and imprisonment.

IGNORING WARNINGS

A series of violent riots erupted in Russian jails during the past year, and the lack of transparency within prisons and the penal system was one of the main reasons for the unrest.

A bill that would have allowed independent organizations to conduct investigations into claims of abuse in the penal system came before the State Duma in 2002 but died after its first reading.

Human rights organizations are pushing for the measure to be re-introduced. They say that had it reached the statute book it could have helped to prevent the prison riots.

Last autumn the Committee For Civil Rights was apparently warned that serious trouble was brewing at a prison camp in the settlement of Metallostroi, on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Several prisoners and their relatives had told the committee the situation was explosive. But when the activists informed the colony's management and the federal penal service and asked to be allowed to investigate and to help resolve the crisis, their request was rejected. And sure enough, says Boris Panteleyev, a human rights advocate with the committee, a riot broke out at the colony in October within three weeks of the warnings.

"The prison authorities simply told us to hand over whatever evidence we had to the prosecutors, and they promised the situation was under full control," Panteleyev recalls. "As we later saw, they failed to prevent the riot."

Russia's penal system has been criticized for human rights abuses, the use of torture, and repressive conditions, with inmates sometimes having to sleep in shifts in their cells and being allocated less than 0.7 square meters of private space per person.

Repression has been increasing over the past decade, according to Yakov Gilinsky, a leading crime analyst with the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Gilinsky was lead researcher on a survey of torture in Russia published last year.

The government does not collect statistics on abuse in prisons. Gilinsky’s group conducted research among prisoners in the city of Chita and the Komi Republic. Thirty-nine percent of respondents in Komi said they were tortured during investigations.

“We didn’t ask the inmates if they had been tortured in prison because if those questions had been on the list we would have been denied access to the prisons,” Gilinsky said. “And even if we did get access, the inmates would have been too scared of possible retaliation to admit [they had been subject to] torture: if their prison got unfavorable statistics, the officers would have come after the interviewees.

"While torture flourishes, anyone who works for the [penal] system is protected by an unwritten rule of impunity," the researcher said.

What happens behind prison walls remains hidden from the general public. And human rights advocates find it difficult to investigate the complaints they receive from prisoners. Often they are denied permission to visit a prisoner. And if they do get into a prison they say they are strictly monitored, which can cause the complainant to clam up.

Attempts to publicize violence perpetrated by police or prison staff may lead to serious problems for those who go public. Take the case of human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov, leader of the Moscow-based Movement for People's Rights who has been trying to draw attention to the plight of imprisoned ex-Yukos executive Vasily Alexanyan.

Alexanyan, who suffers from cancer and AIDS, had been chained to his hospital bed and denied medical care he urgently required. During his campaign Ponomaryov claimed that Yury Kalinin, head of the Federal Penal Service, was responsible for the widespread and deliberate inhuman treatment of prisoners, including torture.

Now Ponomaryov, is under investigation for "insulting the honor and dignity" of Kalinin. He has been charged with slander and is not allowed to leave Moscow for the duration of the investigation.

Prison officials accuse human rights groups of seeking to create confrontation and being uncooperative. Elena Kuznetsova, a human rights official with the St. Petersburg branch of the Federal Penal Service, says that human rights activists often fail to give her the full names of prisoners who report torture, abuse, corruption, or violations of their rights. She says it's essential to identify prisoners correctly in order to launch an investigation into their claims.

But given the nature of the allegations, the high levels of corruption in the prisons, and the invisibility of the inmates, disclosing the names of complainants at an early stage would surely put their safety and even their lives at risk.

ABSENCE OF ENABLING LAWS

The major problem is the continuing lack in Russia of any law enabling civil society to monitor and investigate the country's prisons, investigative agencies, or police. The authorities continue to paint a rosy picture of prison conditions and the standards of police work while preventing independent experts from mounting any kind of effective investigation.

As one human rights advocate puts it, "If you compare the reassuring reports prepared by officials and the stories that we hear from the inmates, a very contradictory picture emerges.

"When I get a phone call from a prison telling me that the inmates were rushed out of their cells to the courtyard just before sunrise, forced to undress and kneel down for many hours, with the riot police officers beating them and urinating on them, I have no way of knowing whether this is true," St. Petersburg human rights advocate Yuly Rybakov said. "Maybe the riot police presented the prisoners with flowers and were extremely courteous, but the inmates were saying otherwise."

We need a law that will give Rybakov and others like him the right to check prisoners' and detainees' stories and to collect evidence. Until this right is granted – and respected – the risks remain high that police units can, when the mood takes them, become death squads, as in Dmitry Smekalov's case, and that jails can be used as torture chambers despite all the fearless campaigning of Lev Ponomaryov and others.

Did you ever notice that the Kremlin expects the West to treat all those it designates as terrorists (for instance, the Chechen rebels) as such, even as it rejects and refuses to respect the West's designations? Russia, for instance, couldn't care less if the whole world thinks Hamas is terrorist, it goes its own way. AFP reports:

Russia will continue to maintain ties with Islamist group Hamas to foster Palestinian peace despite its designation in the West as a terrorist organisation, Russia's foreign minister said Wednesday. Speaking after talks with Yemeni Foreign Minister Abu Bakr al-Kurbi in Moscow, Sergei Lavrov said relations with both Hamas and its more moderate rival Fatah were essential to push the Middle East peace process forward "Russia has very good relations with Fatah, and its leader Mahmud Abbas as the overall Palestinian leader," Lavrov said.

"Russia has relations with Hamas and we use these, and we will actively use these, to help move towards the Yemeni initiative" to foster Palestinian peace, he said. "It is impossible to resolve all of the problems without the unification of the Palestinians as a single people and as a single political-legal space," he said. He said those taking part in the peace process should not try to "drive a wedge" between the two groups.

Fatah and Hamas penned a deal in Yemen last month to open their first direct talks since Hamas drove Fatah forces from the Gaza Strip in June. However, the two factions started bickering about the meaning of the agreement within hours of signing it. Russia has carved out a unique position in Middle East diplomacy by maintaining contacts with both Fatah and Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by the European Union, the United States and Israel.

Once again, Russia's "president" has managed to polarize the entire world against Russia and convinced it that Russia is engaged in naked acts of barbaric, bullying imperialism. The BBC reports:

NATO has warned Russia that its recent troop build-up in Georgia's two breakaway regions undermines its neighbour's territorial integrity. Russia's moves in Abkhazia and South Ossetia were raising tensions in the area, a Nato spokesman said.

Moscow has accused Georgia of preparing to invade Abkhazia, and says it is also boosting Russian peacekeeping forces there and in South Ossetia. Tbilisi has described the Russian move as "irresponsible".

"The steps that have been taken [by Russia] and the rhetoric have increased tensions and undermined Georgia's territorial integrity," Nato spokesman James Appathurai said. He also urged both Moscow and Tbilisi to avoid harsh rhetoric. US National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe on Wednesday said Washington was "concerned abut reports from the region". The European Union has appealed for caution, saying to increase troop numbers would be unwise given current tensions.

Over recent weeks Russia appears to have been significantly turning up the pressure in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the BBC's diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus says. He says that many Western diplomats see these moves as part of a more assertive Russian policy in the wake of Western recognition of the independence of Kosovo in February. The row over Moscow's support for separatist enclaves in Georgia now threatens to provoke a more serious strain between Russia and the West, our correspondent adds.

'Aggressors'

Earlier this week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that Moscow would take "retaliatory measures" if Georgia used force against its breakaway regions. Russia said Georgia was massing 1,500 soldiers and police in the upper Kodori Gorge, the only part of Abkhazia which remains under government control. In response, Moscow said it was increasing Russian peacekeepers in both Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Mr Lavrov said that Russia had to protect Russian-passport holders in the two regions. Georgia denies any build-up of its own forces in the area, and says that Russia is taking provocative action. "We think that this step, if they take it, will cause extreme destabilisation in the region," said Georgian Prime Minister Lado Gurgenidze. "From now on, we consider every [Russian] soldier or any unit of military equipment coming in [to Abkhazia and South Ossetia] as illegal, potential aggressors and potential generators of destabilisation."

Kosovo precedent

Russia has kept a peacekeeping force in Abkhazia and South Ossetia under an agreement made following the wars of the 1990s, when the regions broke away from Tbilisi and formed links with Moscow. There are around 2,000 Russians posted in Abkhazia, and about 1,000 in South Ossetia. Tensions between Russia and Georgia have flared up recently, despite Russia lifting economic sanctions against Georgia earlier this month. Last week, Georgia accused a Russian plane of shooting down an unmanned Georgian spy plane - which Russian authorities insisted was shot down by Abkhaz rebels. And on Tuesday, Georgia said it was blocking Russia's entry to the World Trade Organization.

Many in Abkhazia believe that Kosovo's announcement of independence from Serbia in February provides a precedent for it to be recognised as an individual state. Although it has its own flag and postage stamps, it is not internationally recognised.

RIA Novosti adds:

The European Union's foreign policy chief has warned Russia that its decision to send more peacekeepers to a Georgian breakaway region could prove counterproductive. Russia's Defense Ministry announced on Tuesday it would expand its peacekeeping contingent in Abkhazia, a separatist Black Sea province bordering on Russia, saying Georgia had amassed troops on Abkhazia's border in preparation for a military operation. Speaking after talks in Luxembourg with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Javier Solana told reporters: "It is not wise to increase the number of Russian peacekeepers in Georgia right now."

"Even if the increase in peacekeepers is within limits, if we want to diminish the perception of tensions, I don't think it is a wise measure to increase now." Lavrov gave assurances that Russia was not seeking war with Georgia, and was seeking purely to "prevent frozen conflicts from entering an active phase." He also reiterated the Defense Ministry's warning that any attacks by Georgia on Abkhazia or the country's other rebel region, South Ossetia, would be met by a military retaliation from Russia.

The ministry said in a statement on Tuesday: "Any attempts by Georgia to use force to resolve the conflicts, or to employ violent measures against Russian peacekeepers or Russian citizens living in Abkhazia and South Ossetia will encounter an appropriate and tough response." Russia's Foreign Ministry released a statement on Wednesday defending the peacekeeping move. "It is perfectly clear that the Russian steps are aimed at ensuring the basic rights of Abkhazia and South Ossetia's residents, and not at establishing any kind of control over the territories of the unrecognized republics," the statement said.

Georgia has condemned Russia's move as an act of aggression, and urged the international community to prevent an escalation of tension in the region. Prime Minister Vladimir Gurgenidze said on Tuesday: "We condemn Russia's decision to increase the number of peacekeepers in the conflict zones as an extremely irresponsible move, especially against the background of Russia's latest statements about Abkhazia and South Ossetia."

Abkhazia and South Ossetia broke away from Georgia in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Georgia is looking to regain control over the two republics. Russian President Vladimir Putin called earlier this month for closer ties with the breakaway republics. Putin's statement provoked an angry response from Tbilisi, which accused Russia of attempting to annex the two republics.

The Russian-language newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda ("Young Communist Truth") ran a three-part article in English and Russian versions on April 28, April 29 and April 30. Here is the article in full: