How convenient

This morning I was wondering why the Remainiacs have not come up with the great theory that it was really Mr Putin wot won the Brexit vote through some nefarious intervention. Right on cue, we have Ben Bradshaw MP coming up with that particular theory for which he admits having no evidence at all but it stands to reason, innit.

Mr Bradshaw seems to think that it has somehow been proven that Donald Trump won the election (through the electoral college, let it be noted, not the popular vote) because of some complicated behaviour on the part of the Russians in revealing e-mails that had probably been leaked. Nothing much has been proved yet though it might be in future. Incidentally, I can recall a time when journalists would have been asking why the CIA or, at least, some unknown and unnamed operatives of it were intervening in the electoral process and, apparently, trying to force a re-run. As to Brexit, this is what Mr Bradshaw said [scroll down in Hansard as the Huffpo quotations are wrong and semi-literate];

We have not even begun to wake up to Russia’s cyber-warfare. Its interference in the American presidential elections is now proven. It probably interfered in our own referendum—we do not have the evidence for that yet, but it is highly probable. It will certainly be involved in the French presidential election. There are already serious concerns in the German secret service that Russia is already interfering in the upcoming elections. We have to wake up to this, but when?

Hmm. Convenient. Even the American intervention is not actually fully proven and it is not clear what was achieved by any of the Russian actions, assuming they had taken place and the information had not simply been leaked. To say that it is highly probable that Russia interfered in the referendum though there is no evidence is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. And it will "certainly be involved in the French presidential election"? How does Mr Bradshaw know? Has Mr Putin consulted him?

Still, now we have a great story: when the people decide that they do not want to vote the way they are told by their betters, such as Labour MPs, they are not simply displaying signs of populism (my smelling salts, please); it is all arranged by the Russians because people would never act this way themselves. What it really echoes is Putin's own accusations against all the coloured revolutions on the Russian borders: none of them could have been carried out by the people, they were all organized, funded and carried out by the evil Americans. Mr Bradshaw and his ilk are merely echoing Vlad and his propagandists. Should we be listening to them?

"The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep"

This is the title of David Satter's most recent book, a translation of the Russian saying: Меньше знаешь, крепче спишь. Some might argue that this is a saying that sums up a good deal of Russian history and, alas, the Russian people's attitude. The book is about the transition from the Yeltsin era to the Putin one and deals, particularly, with the infamous apartment block explosions in 1999, which launched the second Chechnyan war and brought an unknown politician and former KGB and FSB officer, Vladimir Putin into prominence.

I shall be writing about the book at a later stage but now I shall concentrate on David's talk given yesterday to the Henry Jackson Society. (Full declaration of interest: David Satter is a good friend.) To anyone who has looked at that terrifying story and at the extraordinarily high death rate among people who tried to investigate what happened when those four apartment blocks blew up and when the fifth one did not, the answer seems obvious: it was a provocation organized by the FSB in order to get Yeltsin off the hook (his popularity had sunk to about 2 per cent), get a "reliable" person into the presidential seat and divert attention from all Russia's problems to just one, Chechnya, where the first war had been a costly and vicious disaster. (The second one is no better only with greater levels of cruelty.) While 9/11 truthers are coming up with ever more bizarre stories, this remains the reality but the breathtaking cynicism behind it and the readiness on the part of the Russian political elite to kill their own people in order to achieve their particular nasty aims makes it difficult for many to accept that this is what happened. In fact, I have heard at least one person who is well in with officialdom proclaim that he knew nobody, nobody at all who believed that it was the FSB. My reply was that I knew nobody, either Russian and British who did not believe that it was the FSB and that happens to be true.

David Satter started with the Yeltsin years and the catastrophe they turned out to be. This, I think, is a tremendous shame as the beginning of the period did seem quite hopeful. Indeed, looking back on those years from where we are now, they still seem quite hopeful. I agree with David that Yeltsin was not a democrat in any real sense and was, in many ways, an inadequate leader and wrote so when he died.

The problem, David Satter said, is the strong misunderstanding of what was required to extirpate the Marxist/Communist system, which grew out of a misunderstanding of the system itself. When the Soviet Union collapsed the assumption was in the successor states as well as the myriads of Western advisers and, let us face it, people who were hoping to benefit personally, that the main problem was economic and privatization of state property, which was practically everything, will solve it all. Of course, some of us said even at the time that privatization without an understanding of the rule of law will not work.

Communism first and foremost was a system of morality that had led to complete immorality and criminality. There is no place here to discuss all that but it is clear and was even in the early nineties that to overcome its noxious effects, another system of morality had to be established. Sadly, there were very few people who could produce this (the Russian Orthodox Church being notoriously deficient in ideas that oppose the state) and even fewer who could put them into practice. The great academician Sakharov died far too early.

So privatization proceeded with little regard as to who benefited and far too many people lost out economically and intellectually in that what they had been supposed to believe disappeared almost overnight with nothing in its place. To some extent people gave up and that explains Putin's early popularity: he was going to hand something back to Russia and Russians. For various reasons, not unconnected with the rise in oil and gas prices he also presided over a period when more people had a materially better life than anyone in Russia could recall.

Putin's present popularity, which, inevitably was raised in discussion is based on the various lies and distortions that the now almost completely state controlled media pours out but it is also questionable. The recent news that the only independent polling organization, Levada, has been named "a foreign agent" by the Ministry of Justice thus making its work well-nigh impossible indicates a fear in the Kremlin that their polling results will not be the ones that are wanted.

One could say that they are lucky. The infamous census of 1937, which showed a far lower population in the USSR than expected (after collectivization and the attendant famine as well as the early purge arrests) the results were destroyed and those who conducted it arrested and sent to the Gulag. A new census was conducted in 1939 after two more years of frenzied arrests, deaths and executions with the figures coming out considerably more favourably than in 1937. Go figure.

David Satter's view is that Russia is now in a grip of a mass psychosis and he speculated what would have happened if the explanations for the explosions (it was the Chechnyans though there was a complete denial on their part and the explosions did not bring about a favourable situation for them) and, especially, the fifth would-be explosion (it was just a test to see whether people are aware of the danger) had been met with the sort of open scepticism in Russia and abroad that they deserved.

Would Russia have avoided the Nord-Ost siege of 2002 and the Beslan school siege of 2004, both started by Chechnyan terrorists but both witnessing a far higher number of hostages killed by the OMON personnel? Would we have seen the invasion of Georgia, the occupation of Crimea and the war in eastern Ukraine that has already claimed something like 100,000 victims? Impossible to tell. But as Putin has started so he has gone on and the ending of the story is not going to be good for anyone.

It is, as David Satter said, and I entirely agree with him, the duty of Western politicians, writers, journalists, analysts and intellectuals (whoever they may be) to tell the truth about the regime and about its origins. That includes not "forgetting" about those apartment blocks as too many people seem to.

Books I have been reading: Luke Harding - A Very Expensive Poison

Probably I ought to be writing about the extraordinary fracas created by the Times and its hackette, Rachel Sylvester, around the Conservative Party leadership race and I shall do so tomorrow, by which time perhaps the newspaper will produce the full tapes of the interview with Andrea Leadsom, settling to some extent the row. As things stand the newspaper cannot be seen to have behaved honestly or honourably but that does not surprise those of us who have viewed the Times for some time as nothing better than a rag with delusions of grandeur.

Until then, let us turn to other, equally important matters. I have already written about the launch of Luke Harding's book about the Litvinenko affair, A Very Expensive Poison but since then I have also read the book and it is, in my opinion, of great importance and interest. It describes the crime in detail, the various events surrounding it, in Britain, Russia and Ukraine and also the Inquiry and Sir Robert Owen's astonishing report. The book is undoubtedly a page-turner. How could it be otherwise, given its subject, but not everyone could have done as much justice to it as Luke Harding.

At times the language gets a little too journalistic and too Guardian-like. For instance one cannot help wondering what Mr Harding's experience of judges might have been if he thinks that a retired one like Sir Robert Owen being fair and open-minded as well as dryly witty somehow makes him "cool". Actually, it makes him normal as judges go. At other times I thought that the author (who is, in fact, a good friend) had spent a little too much time with Russians and in the process lost a good many definite and indefinite articles. But these are really minor cavils and make one smile while reading a story that is sad, depressing but also, at times, uproariously funny. The account of those two hapless assassins, Andrei Lugovoi, now important politician and recipient of a state honour for services to the fatherland, second class (would he have received first class if he had not been quite so inept?) and Dmitry Kovtun, of whose subsequent career far less is known, wandering round London, trying to find an opportunity to feed Polonium 210 to their victim, failing, flushing it down the toilet and then coming back to try again is richly and blackly comic. As Luke Harding says, Russia does produce the best news stories.

There are many things the reader can find out: Alexander Litvinenko's attempts to introduce some kind of honesty into the FSB, President Putin's enmity towards him precisely because of that, his relationship with Boris Berezovsky (also dead in mysterious circumstances); Putin's probably links (well, almost certain) to criminal gangs, the FSB's absolutely certain links to those gangs; the careers (if one can call it that) of the two assassins and, most interestingly, the various meeting places for agents, both British and Russian. There are hilariously funny descriptions of Lugovoy's and Kovtun's various visits to London and their hopeless attempts to pass as ordinary businessmen (a police constable at Heathrow picked them out on sight as suspicious individuals) and their equally hilarious attempts to find some entertainment. There is a wonderful description of a particular dodgy nightclub in St James's, called Hey Jo's, visited by the two Russians during one of their unsuccessful trips to London. Low levels of radiation were found in various places but not on the floor or the large phallus at the entrance.

Hey Jo's was linked to a restaurant called Abracadabra, which served Russian food in the most outrageously and hideously glitzy surroundings. Neither place exists any longer since the owner, former Essex fruit and veg stall owner, Dave West, was knifed by his son some time last year. The son is serving a sentence of 16 years for manslaughter.

The book places the grim tale in an international background. There are excellent, pithy accounts of the growth of the Russian mafia state, the invasion of Ukraine, the shooting down of MH17 and of the murder of Boris Nemtsov. In fact, everything you ever wanted to know about Putin's Russia but were too frightened to ask is here.

All of that is fascinating but the best part remains the account, suitably tense as if this were a thriller, of Sir Robert Owen's inquiry, the evidence that came out during it and, finally, the report, which firmly accused Lugovoi and Kovtun and equally firmly pointed an accusing finger at President Putin, a man described by people as a gangster masquerading as a statesman.

So far so good. But what is the British government going to do about it, given that we have never managed to produce a Magnitsky List? Well, not a lot. Home Secretary and Prime Ministerial hopeful Theresa May, who had stood firm against any kind of inquiry until the shooting down of MH17, something that even she could not ignore, has also made it clear that nothing much was going to be done. We were not even going to issue a Litvinenko List as that might upset some highly placed Russians, specifically the President. One cannot see her changing her mind if she becomes Prime Minister.

So, knowing that a British citizen was murdered on British soil by foreign agents on the orders of a foreign leader, we can rest assured that .... we shall keep quiet about that and about other suspicious deaths. Not quite, of course. Marina Litvinenko has not kept quiet and has finally achieved that inquiry and the report she wanted to read; Scotland Yard may have kept quiet but behind that quietness worked hard to collect evidence and witnesses; Sir Robert Owen did not keep quiet but produced a bombshell of a report that was carefully argued on the basis of evidence; above all, Luke Harding has not kept quiet and for that we must be very grateful. This book should be read by anyone who attempts to make statements about Russia.

I find Putin's propaganda department disappointing

Had this happened under Stalin we would by now have had a definite story of what actually was wrong with Vladimir Kara-Murza, a well known Russian oppositionist who is in hospital, having been taken ill suddenly a few days ago, almost immediately after showing a film about the rule of Putin's buddy Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya. Mr Kara-Murza is, apparently, still unconscious and on a life support machine with many different tubes attached to him. Here is a fairly good summary of events and comments.

Given the number of President Putin's opponents who have died either violently or mysteriously and given the sequence of events that immediately preceded Mr Kara-Murza's sudden violent illness, inevitably certain conclusions were drawn by all those who follow these events in Russia and outside it.

What astonished me is that there was no counter-story prepared. We have been given no official version of what is wrong with Mr Kara-Murza beyond the odd bleating about the possibility of out of date yoghurt or a bad banana. Oh really? Total kidney failure and coma because of out of date yoghurt? Who is going to believe that?

Well, I'll tell you who: NYU professor and Russian security expert Mark Galeotti who told RuNet Echo:

Let's wait for proper medical assessments before constructing fantasy scenarios that say more about our own assumptions than anything else. Kadyrov certainly is all too willing to resort to murder, but his is the way of the gun and the bomb, not the subtleties of poison.

Kadyrov? Really? No other person and organization might have been involved? Hmmm. I appreciate the need to be cautious (as I more than appreciate Mr Kara-Murza senior's ultra cautious comments) but this is going beyond anything sensible. Which brings me to my original point: where are those "proper" medical assessments? Really what on earth did Lieutenant-Colonel Putin learn in the KGB?

Mostly I despair

Mostly but not always. Mostly I despair of the eurosceptic movement and all who sail in it, particularly when questions outside their tiny little world come up. Or, in other words, I do not think the overwhelming proportion of eurosceptics can or want to understand what is going on in various parts of the world. It is all too difficult and, therefore, they relate everything to what they think they know (but actually rarely do as nothing happens in isolation). So, just as the left has to relate everything to the evil American empire so a large proportion of eurosceptics has to relate everything to the EU, whether that benighted organization is of any relevance or not. As a consequence, the insanely anti-American left and right (a smidgeon more insane than the left), a number of Conservative politicians who have learnt nothing from the second half of the twentieth century and a very large proportion of self-accredited eurosceptics have been cheering for President Putin and his jolly Chekists as they invaded Ukraine, took away a part of it, Crimea and sent in more troops in funny clothes to link up with local separatists in order to destabilize parts of eastern Ukraine.

You'd think that people who are in favour of national sovereignty, especially based on an agreement that was created when a forcibly united multi-national state based on ideology fell apart, would actually support one of them when it is under attack. Well, you'd be wrong. A curious misreading of what happened in Ukraine has led a number of eurosceptics helter-skelter into the ranks of the Putinistas who appear to be in favour of the recreation of a new Soviet Union in the shape of the Eurasian Union. (Fortunately for many of us, not to mention the people of the former Soviet Union, Russia as led and destroyed by Vlad and his mates is not in a fit state to impose its rule on the others though it is quite capable of the aforementioned territorial invasion and destabilization.)

Why am I not in total despair? Well, it always cheers me when I read an article that clearly understand the issues and does not mince its language. Such an article is in July/August's issue of Standpoint and it is by my good friend (full disclosure) Michael Mosbacher.

He lambasts the insane and Stalinist left and insane right in equal measure but what is particularly painful from my point of view is his well-argued and fully justified attack on the Bruges Group that, in my absence from its counsels, seems to have gone slightly mad.

Whether intentionally or not, the Eurosceptic Bruges Group has become an apologist for Putin. The group was established in 1989 to support the views expounded by Margaret Thatcher in her Bruges speech of the previous year calling for an end to the federalist project and a more decentralised Europe. It has now produced Someone Had Blunder'd, a 30-minute film attacking UK and EU policy on Ukraine for provoking Russia, indeed for being the cause of the current crisis. It is fronted by Bruges Group director Robert Oulds and features Conservative MPs Peter Bone, Bernard Jenkin and John Redwood, twice a leadership candidate, as well as erstwhile party chairman Lord Tebbit. They are now exploring a follow-up film with Sir Bill Cash MP.

The argument of these critics is that, in the phrase of Bernard Jenkin, the Euro-neocons — surely as mythical a beast as any yet imagined — running the EU have pursued an aggressive policy of eastward expansion which has encroached on Russia's sphere of influence and thus made it feel threatened. In their view it is the EU's rather than Russia's expansionism which has provoked conflict. Jenkin argues that the EU has been "fomenting divisions in order to bring Ukraine into the European orbit". Redwood says: "It was EU action seeking to expand their empire to the West [sic] which first started the reaction of Russia."

To be honest none of the participants of the film are people to whom I would turn for elucidation of any question of foreign affairs, let alone those to do with the former Soviet Union. What the egregious John Redwood might have meant by his comment is anybody's guess as is Bernard Jenkin's invention of the mythical and meaningless Euro-neocons.

Mr Mosbacher explanation of what happened and what role the EU played at the very beginning of the crisis (after which it became irrelevant as I have mentioned a few times before) is accurate:

It is true that the demonstrations against Yanukovych began last November when he announced that he would not be signing an Association Agreement with the EU but would instead throw in his lot with Putin's Eurasian Customs Union.

The critics are right that the Association Agreement is much more than a free-trade agreement. In Article Seven it commits Ukraine to "promote gradual convergence in the area of foreign and security policy". Article Ten of the agreement provides for "increasing the participation of Ukraine in EU-led civilian and military crisis management operations" and exploring the potential of military-technological cooperation.

The agreement may indeed undermine Ukrainian sovereignty, but surely is nothing compared to the Russian-dominated Eurasian Customs Union. While the latter may on paper be nothing more than a customs union does anyone seriously believe that it will remain as such? Has Putin's aggression in Ukraine not rather proven the point that Ukrainian sovereignty is not high on his list of priorities?

Clearly, it is not high on the average eurosceptic's list of priorities either (that is, assuming, they know where Ukraine is, something I am doubtful of).

There is also a well deserved attack on the Conservatives and their allies in the Council of Europe and its preposterous Parliamentary Assembly.  Read the whole piece.  The title? Putin Has His Useful Idiots on the Left and the Right.

A few additional comments

Is it not extraordinary how many people who would not be able to tell the difference between Kyiv, Kharkiv and Lviv, let alone place them on the map, have now become experts on Ukrainian matters? It takes all my time just to avoid having discussions with them as these can lead nowhere.

Rumours about what is going on in Crimea abound with the Kremlin insisting the troops moved in to protect Russian civilians though no evidence of any attacks has been offered. Plus there was this:

Russia's military has given Ukrainian forces in Crimea until dawn on Tuesday to surrender or face an assault, Ukrainian defence sources have said.

The head of Russia's Black Sea Fleet Aleksander Vitko set the deadline and also threatened two warships, Ukrainian officials said.

However, Interfax news agency later quoted a fleet spokesman who denied that any ultimatum had been issued.

Whom to believe? I suppose we shall know by tomorrow morning.

Meanwhile, here are a few links worthy following up. An interesting analysis by Mark Galeotti, an expert on Russian history and security. Having written before that he did not think Putin would take the Crimea because that would not be in his interests, he is now wondering whether the man has actually gone too far to draw back.

What, one might ask, is Moscow’s endgame? What does it want, and how likely is it to get it. The more it radicalises Kyiv, the less likely it is to get some wider political settlement. Instead, it might be forced to take Crimea if for no other reason than that it has to be seen to accomplish something, even if this is a pyrrhic victory, one which will only hurt Russia.

Here, after all, is the perverse and twisted irony of the situation. Strictly from a coldly logical position (and I am not advocating this, I should add), in many ways it is in Kyiv’s interests for Moscow to steal Crimea, and turn it into some pseudo-state or new part of the Russian Federation. Ukraine loses a sunny peninsula, but also a distinct drain on the state’s coffers (the Crimean economy is not great, and the region receives net subsidies from the centre). It sheds the most troublesome and Russophile of its regions, one which has been a turbulent locus of trouble for Kyiv for most of post-Soviet Ukraine’s history. It also gets concrete proof of the threat it faces from Russian bullying and probably accelerated and solicitous assistance from the US, EU, NATO, etc. It also validates every Ukrainian fear about Russia.

The question "what is Moscow's endgame" has been asked with increasing bewilderment by many people who actually do know where all those Ukrainian cities are.

Vladimir Kara-Murza's piece is a few days old but is still worth reading though I suspect there is a certain amount of wishful thinking there. Also a reminder by Timothy Snyder, who has been writing the best informed articles on the subject, that rearranging borders, hardly an unknown event in history, is fraught with difficulties, not least because other people might get the same idea. In this case, China might decide something not dissimilar in Siberia.

So what else is happening? The UN Security Council is meeting as we speak and NATO intends to have another meeting tomorrow. The EU is sending various threats though the UK for one has announced that it has no intention of breaking business relations with Russia and, presumably, of denying various visas to people who had voted to give the President the right to send troops into Ukraine.

The market has reacted though, as Russia is not the Soviet Union and is not outside world economy and the market forces. The rouble has hit a new low and the value of stocks and shares on the Moscow stock exchange has plummeted. Again.

As it happens, there is another player on the scene, one with historic connection to Crimea and that is Turkey. Various members of the Turkish government have been calling for the continued existence of a united Ukraine and for a restoration of stability. According to the Foreign Ministry, Turkey will do everything possible to ensure that Crimea remains in Ukraine. The Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, has visited Kyiv, and has held meetings with the acting President, various other politicians and Former Chairman of The Crimean Tatars National Assembly and Ukrainian Deputy Mustafa Abdulcemil Kirimoglu. Apparently, it was a closed meeting so anything could have been decided. Will Turkey suddenly emerge as the protector of the Crimean Tatars?

Khodorkovsky in Berlin

Well, I was wrong but I was also right. I said that the hastily issued amnesty will not extend to Mikhail Khodorkovsky and it did not. Nevertheless, the man has suddenly been snatched from his Siberian labour camp and brought out to Berlin, released on the say-so of Tsar Vlad the Impaler. So I was wrong on that: I did not think he would be released and wondered whether Putin would be mad enough to have a third case against his arch-enemy.

Although the BBC's website led with the story of two completely unknown people who used to work for a celebrity cook not being found guilty of whatever they were accused of, most of the rest of the media led with the astonishing story of President Putin announcing on Thursday that he was thinking of pardoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky just because he has spent ten years in prisons and labour camps (he was due out next August, incidentally) and the man's appearance outside prison and then in Berlin on Friday. a mediaeval monarch could not have done better. So I say and so it shall be.

Mind  you, we have been here before with the dear departed (more or less) Soviet Union. Remember the sudden exchange of Vladimir Bukovsky for the Chilean communist Luis Corvalán even though the Soviet Union had "no political prisoners"? Or when Alexander Solzhenitsyn was suddenly bundled out of the USSR? Now it is Khodorkovsky's turn and the rumours and speculations are rife. Nobody knows what the deal is but most people (especially if they are Russians who have lived in the comfortable West all this time) has opinions.

An interesting article on Echo Moskvy [in Russian but can be translated] analyzes the ten-year long (actually a trifle longer) battle or chess game between the two and speculates as to what might have prompted this latest move and what might happen next. At least, the author freely acknowledges that he has no idea but he doubts whether Putin has really won this time any more than he has done in the past. After all, the net result of Khodorkovsky's imprisonment on trumped up charges was that the world was endlessly discussing his fate, Putin was questioned at every international press conference, the subject was raised by various foreign politicians. The man just would not go away and as he was not killed in the first few months it all became very difficult.

For ten years Khodorkovsky held out and now he asked to be released because his mother is being treated for cancer and he wants to be with her. His own statement affirmed that he was not acknowledging his guilt. Putin may have shown himself to be more powerful but Khodorkovsky has once again grabbed the moral high ground.

Western media outlets like Der Spiegel have been speculating that the very limited amnesty and this latest move are part of Putin's belated effort to make the Sochi Olympics in February an international success rather than something of an embarrassment with Western leaders staying away, if not in droves, then in respectable numbers. Will this work? After all, those leaders are getting worked up about the treatment of LGBT Russians not the general state of human rights, which is deplorable, to put it mildly. How will Russians react if various leaders stay away from Sochi? Will they feel humiliated and blame Vlad for it or will they be angry because self-righteous Westerners dare to lecture them? Clearly, the Prez is not taking any chances.

Reuters also speculated about Sochi but added

It also appeared to show that Putin is feeling confident in his control of the country after facing down street protests when he was re-elected last year.

Again, maybe. Certainly Khodorkovsky immediately raised the subject of others who have been unjustly imprisoned, particularly those involved in his case. Platon Lebedev, his co-defendant, is still in a labour camp.

There are numerous other stories out there but all tread the same paths, raise the same points and speculate along the same lines.

What will Khodorkovsky do now? Meet his family and rest, one assumes. And then? Will he lie low for a while, giving a few interviews and then staying quiet? Hard to believe. Will he become a kind of modern day Alexander Herzen? That is possible. After all, as has been pointed out, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the successful businessman, the putative reformer of Russian business and political practices, trod a well known Russian path: while in Siberian labour camps he became a symbol of resistance and a man of conscience.

What a great idea

According to NEWSru.com [in Russian] President Putin has come up with a great idea in his discussions with regional ombudsmen (региональными омбудсменами): there needs to be a new concept created that would consolidate the peoples of the country. As it happens, there was an example he could cite: the Soviet Union in which, he admitted, some bad things happened but one of the good things was the invention of the concept of the "Soviet people". Something along those lines was needed.

President Putin did not explain whether the sort of destruction of various ethnic groups that the Soviet Union specialized in was to be part of the new concept.

Eurasia Daily Monitor on what next in Russia

Like everyone else, Pavel Baev is speculating. Russia is an odd country (yes, thank you, you can pipe down at the back): the only one in which we always know the election results well ahead but can never predict what will happen afterwards.

His final paragraph is of interest:

The explosion of street protests in Moscow was a real scare for Putin. While now he enjoys his victory, granting concessions to those responsible for the weeks of panic would have been very much against his unforgiving nature. He believes that the weak always are – and should be – beaten, and fancies that he has proven himself to be strong. The fight on the last stretch of elections was, in his imagination, not against the cheerful crowds on the Bolotnaya square but against the dark forces that sought to dismember Russia in collusion with the eternal Western enemies. Those in the opposition who expect dialogue and liberal reforms are going to be disappointed – and will discover the depth of Putin’s vindictiveness. Paradoxical as it may seem, this revenge of Putinism could be the answer to the opposition’s search for a new energy and unity.

Actually, the whole piece is worth reading. As it happens, I do not think President-Re-elect Putin has shown himself to be strong and what is more worrying for him, it has become more and more obvious. Screaming abuse of one's enemies is not the same as strength of character or position. But he is, most certainly, unforgiving and a bully.

Some thoughts on Russia and its not so new President

[Warning: this is quite a long piece of general musing. Maybe too long for this blog. It was intended for another outlet but that did not work out. So I am putting it up here in the hopes that some people might read it.]

The dust has more or less settled in the matter of the Russian presidential election and we are between two protests – one last Monday at the end of which the police finally turned relatively violent for the first time since December 5 and a forthcoming one on Saturday, March 10. The time has probably come to discuss, as a number of people have been doing, as to what might come next for Russia, her new (or should that be renewed) President and the ruling elite who has a symbiotic relationship with him.

The immediate reaction divided into two: there was the “Putin is virtually finished despite the victory after that fraudulent campaign and election” camp and the “Putin will now live up to the threatening rhetoric of the election campaign and turn very nasty” camp. Both opinions are about the future as Putin will not be officially inaugurated for another three months. One good thing: there will be no need for any kind of a hand-over.

Many of those who have proclaimed Putin’s soon-to-come political end are now saying sorrowfully that the opposition seems to be running out of steam; the turn-out on Monday was not as large as that of previous demonstrations and the mood was rather despondent. It is not clear what the demonstrators were really expecting but short of a miracle Putin was going to win that election and modern Russian history has been short of miracles. It is true that nearly 40 per cent did not bother to vote and of those who did turn out nearly 40 per cent voted against him. It is also true that the only candidate who can be called at all oppositionist, the vaguely liberally minded billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov, who is, nevertheless, supposed to have good links with the Kremlin, came third with 20 per cent of the vote.

Undoubtedly the electoral fraud reported across the country was real and the whole electoral campaign had been fixed in the usual way with no registration of real candidates, suppression of meetings, no access to the media and in those circumstances it is hard to assess whether Putin would have won in a free and fair election or not. Probably yes but he clearly did not think so. That is obvious not just from the extended fraud, which might be put down to the usual Russian fear of democracy, but from the ridiculous and hysterical speeches he made on the “campaign trail”. The suddenly discovered terrorist plot that was supposed to target the newly elected President was laughed out of court in Russia as well as in the West. One wonders what happened the badly damaged alleged terrorist who gave the information on TV and whether he will be dragged out again at a later date if Putin does decide to turn on his enemies.

Then there was the strange comment that an opposition leader might be murdered in order to blame the regime, which would, presumably, necessitate the regime to hunt down the supposed murderers and anyone else who might be in the conspiracy. That must have reminded a few people of the events of December 1, 1934 when the First Secretary of the Leningrad Party, Sergey Kirov, who had quite a following in the whole party and was supposed to have clashed with Stalin, was assassinated in very mysterious circumstances. Stalin became Chief Mourner and used Kirov’s death to launch the great purge. While Putin is no Stalin, his vocabulary, his threats, his ready and hysterical identification of opposition to him with enemies of Russia bring back uneasy memories. The fact that he used similar vocabulary for his victory speech, which he made long before he ought to have done when only a small minority of the results had been declared, was what made people think that in his third term Vladimir Putin will turn on his opponents with an even greater ferocity than before. He and his various colleagues and minions have done so before but for the first time in his career, the man is facing an opposition that seems to have some popular roots and he appears to be afraid of it, despite its limited size. But then, he seems to be afraid of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the former CEO of Yukos, destroyed by Putin with, sad to say, the help of Western firms and politicians though the man is in a prison camp near the Finnish border, serving his second sentence on trumped up charges. For all of that, he also seems to be producing some interesting ideas and strategic instructions to the opposition, so, maybe, President-Elect Putin is right to be frightened of him.

The fact is that the situation has changed because of those large spontaneous demonstrations even if the movement may peter out now. After all, it is a little depressing to keep going to rallies and demonstrations that get you nowhere. The anti-corruption blogger Alexei Navalny is apparently working on ways of continuing the pressure and building it up slowly and peacefully. One has to admit that the first attempt to do so, a proposed erection of tents on the Western “occupy” model failed. The police moved in and dispersed the remaining demonstrators, arresting around 250. (Another 50 were arrested in St Petersburg.) They were all released within a few hours and have had to appear in civil courts. Other demonstrations have been cancelled; we shall have to see what happens on Saturday. But the rallies and demonstrations did happen and may revive if things do not improve as they are unlikely to do. Putin’s image has been tarnished: he is no longer the all-conquering hero, supported by the Russian population.

The economic situation is against him. On the one hand, the stability and high oil and gas prices meant a better living standard for most Russians than anything they can remember. But this merely encourages the growing middle class to look for political rights as well. Many of them travel to the West and they know that those living standards are still not quite good enough, given all the facts. They are becoming aware of the backwardness of the country, the low standards of the infrastructure (you don’t have to travel to the West to know that but if you do you are less likely to accept it as unavoidable). So the higher living standards are no longer Putin’s friends.

Then again, those standards are falling and are likely to fall even more. Economic growth that Russian officials boast of so proudly is likely to fall to 3.5 per cent, which is higher than that of the West but the starting point is much lower. There are reports of high unemployment in some parts, of demonstrations and riots for economic rather than political reasons and of hasty attempts to pacify the population.

Corruption is unlikely to go away. Mr Putin has said that fighting corruption and raising living standards will be the primary aim of his coming term. What, many people will ask, has he been doing all these years of being in power either openly or covertly.

Assuming that Mr Putin will not be able to solve the economic problems (he has not produced any ideas as to how he might do that) and will not touch the closely related problem of corruption, what will he do if the opposition, which he considers to be enemies of Russia, rears its head again? He can start negotiating, which he has refused to do so far but may not be able to avoid much longer. Most likely he will use the present President and Prime Minister to come Medvedev to make pacific gestures and promises such as the latest one to review 32 dubious cases, including that of Khodorkovsky and his second in command, Platon Lebedev.

He can decide to resign at some point or do what Yeltsin did and promote a useful tool to the position on condition that he and his family are left in peace to enjoy whatever loot they possess. Such deals seem to be the norm in modern Russia but it might provoke a truly violent reaction.

He can live up to his rhetoric and within months of re-inauguration start cracking down on the opposition perhaps reviving the concept of show trials and other suchlike instruments of government. At the same time he might decide to purge some of the siloviki, who are his supporters as they, too, might be eyeing him and his position with speculation. 

Or he can wait and see, the most attractive and see - the most dangerous option as it leaves the initiative to the people or disgruntled supporters.

The least surprising electoral result

We all know what it is: former President and former Prime Minister of Russia, Vladimir Putin has been re-elected. He is once again the President. Can't say he is once again the Boss as he always was despite the misplaced hopes for Medvedev asserting himself expressed by the odd Western analyst. Putin's teddy bear had no power base - how could he have possibly asserted himself.

The result, given that no genuine oppositionist was allowed to register as a candidate and the two leading opponents were the perennial leaders of the Communist and the nationalist Liberal-Democrat parties were not what one might call overwhelming. On a turn-out of around 63 per cent Putin is supposed to have secured 64 per cent of the vote on official figures, which are being disputed with a good deal of filmed and otherwise described evidence of blatant vote rigging.

Tens of thousands of people have been demonstrating in Moscow under the very watchful eyes of the security services. Several hundred were arrested including the leaders Alexei Navalny and Sergei Udaltsov. Another fifty or so were arrested in St Petersburg. All seem to have been released and the cases will be handed over to civilian courts.

Further developments will be watched with interest but it seems that what annoys people more than anything is the shamelessness of the fraud and of the shenanigans, the contemptuous rejection of all criticism and complaints. It seems that President Putin does not care whether his support is on the wane or not. That is not a very sensible way to behave as the slightest knowledge of Russian history would tell him.

A day to celebrate

Today is the anniversary of Joseph Stalin's death on March 5, 1953. Well, OK, it is the anniversary of the day on which his death was announced since there are a few murky details around his death as there were around almost every part of his life. His funeral on March 8 was another bloody occasion as hundreds of people were crushed in a stampede caused, most likely by inefficiency and paranoid security.

One wonders whether the renewed President Putin remembers the date.

Well, now, how convenient

The news from Russia on Sunday was of the last anti-Putin demonstration before the election next Sunday. Russian laws forbid demonstrations and political meetings on the day of election or just before it. So, on Sunday 30,000 or so people encircled the centre of Moscow (as they are no longer allowed to hold meetings actually in the centre). People came from many other cities and joined in. Mostly, the day went peacefully with just a little bit of trouble and some arrests.

Here is a very entertaining description of events with some excellent pictures by the journalist Lucian Kim. He reminds us that

Last week Vladimir Putin recalled the heroic defense of Moscow against Napoleon’s invading army in an effort to rally supporters and cast his opponents as foreign agents. But it’s too late. Putin has already lost the Russian capital.

Of course Russia’s vast police force still physically controls Moscow. Yet as Putin positions himself for a third term as president, he no longer commands the hearts and minds of Muscovites.

The once and future President of Russia is given to comparing his opponents with foreign invaders and constantly accuses them of being in the West's pay, the implication being that Russians are not capable of political thinking or activity unless somebody from outside bribes them to do so. According to the various accounts, this is beginning to annoy people in Moscow (which any leader of Russia must hold or he might as well give up being leader) and in other places.

Meanwhile, the still-Prime Minister Putin has been lambasting the Baltic states as well on the subject of their minority rights policies. The countries in question do have some problems with their Russian population, many of whom are there because their grandparents and great-grandparents were encouraged to settle and take up the places left empty by Balts who had been deported to Siberia in 1940 and again in 1945.

The problems, however, are not quite as great as the still-Prime Minster tries to make out in order to sound really tough.

Both Estonia and Latvia have large ethnic Russian minorities among their populations, a legacy of Soviet-era migration policies. Most have taken Estonian, Latvian or Russian citizenship, however around 100,000 in Estonia and 290,000 in Latvia have still not opted to apply. Application for Estonian and Latvian citizenship in most cases requires passing a language examination.

 In the recent referendum in Latvia an attempt to make Russian the second state language was defeated.

Russian is the first language for about one-third of the Baltic country’s 2.1 million people, and many of them would like to accord official status to the language to reverse what they claim has been 20 years of discrimination.

But for ethnic Latvians, the referendum was a brazen attempt to encroach on Latvia’s independence, which was restored two decades ago after a half-century of occupation by the Soviet Union following World War II.

Many Latvians still consider Russian — the lingua franca of the Soviet Union — as the language of the former occupiers. They also harbor deep mistrust toward Russia and worry that Moscow attempts to wield influence in Latvia through the ethnic Russian minority.

There never was the slightest chance of that attempt succeeding.

On Monday, however, we got the "real news" and one cannot help feeling that it came at a very convenient moment for the once and future President. It seems that the Ukrainian security services have ... ahem ... uncovered a plot to blow up President Putin as he will be by then immediately after the election next Sunday.

The murder plot was allegedly exposed after the blast in Odessa on January 4, which was initially thought to be a domestic gas explosion. However, it transpired to be an accident during the preparation of an explosive device.

Channel One showed Osmayev in detention saying: "The ultimate aim was to travel to Moscow and try to assassinate Premier Putin." One of the men, Ruslan Madayev, 26, died in the blast but Ukrainian special forces seized a second, Ilya Pyanzin, 28, two days later. Osmayev, who was shown with blotches of green antiseptic covering wounds on his face, was captured at the beginning of February. The men had a laptop with several videos of Mr Putin's cortege travelling through Moscow on it.

For some reason there is a great deal of scepticism being voiced about this highly convenient announcement that follows the news of another large-scale demonstration.

Dmitry Oreshkin, a political scientist, said the "timely" appearance of the assassination plot was "a sign that the real leaders of Vladimir Putin's political apparatus – people from the FSB – are trying an old trick to mobilise public opinion using the logic: 'Enemies are all around us. We have just one decisive, effective, clever national leader who they are trying to destroy.'" Oreshkin said the electorate was expected to react by consolidating around Putin against the external threat, giving "a considerable boost to his ratings".

Other stories confirm the scepticism and indicate that there are certain discrepancies between the various stories as they are and have been put out. It seems that the Putin assassination attempt has been a late addition to a story that started off as one of a possible gas leak caused explosion.

Let's face it, many of us wondered whether something of this kind might appear in the run-up to that election though this seems to be crude even by Putin's standards. However, let us look at the bright side: at least there have been no bombs in apartment blocks.

Last minute information

I do apologize for the shortness of this notice but I knew nothing about the event until an hour or so ago. As it happens I have to be at the Bruges Group meeting this evening but anyone who is more interested in Russian affairs than in Robin Harris and Simon Heffer talking, might like to know that there will be a demonstration outside Pushkin House starting at 18.45 (actually, people might be able to get to both events) as the fourth part of the BBC programme about Putin and the West is being previewed there.

From what I can gather even from sympathetic reviewers (no TV in my house, you see) the programmes have not gone out of their way to show various aspects of the Putin regime but then they did have to get various officials to give interviews. The fact that their main consultant Angus Roxburgh has spent some years working on PR for the Kremlin helped them to get to these people. (In parenthesis, let me add that Mr Roxburgh was a failure. The Kremlin's PR is rubbish.)

The BBC Russian Service interviewed the makers of the four-part programme and here is the text of that interview in Russian and in English. Worth a quick read if you want to see examples of true disingenuousness.

Is there anything this man cannot do?

Not content with riding bare-chested, appearing at wrestling matches (though he is not going to do that again any time soon) and diving for carefully placed amphorae, the once and future President, now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has decided to display his credentials as the world's (well, Russia's) leading literary critic. In fact, he intends to be the leading literary critic.

RFE/RL reports that the Prime Minister is taking his presidential campaign seriously. He has published all sorts of policies about dealing with immigrants (presumably from other parts of the former Soviet Union) but he is also giving attention to what being "an insider" in Russia might consist of. Well, somebody has to and there are no other Russian writers, thinkers or philosophers out there. The man has to see to everything himself. Shocking.

His latest idea is to create "a cultural canon of 100 books to serve as required reading for all students in Russia's schools". Well, all right, he can't do everything himself so he has called on the elves in his grotto "leading cultural authorities" to create such a list, asserting on no evidence whatsoever that other countries not only have such lists but actually abide by them.

As the article on RFE/RL points out, there already are such lists in existence but, apparently, the one Mr Putin has in mind is wider than just literary works (and, one assumes, he will not include And Quiet Flows the Don but one can never tell).

It remains to be seen, however, whether Putin will favor the inclusion of foreign authors, as many Western book lists do -- and as many Russian readers would seemingly prefer. An informal reader poll on the website 100bestbooks.ru ranks British writer Arthur Conan Doyle and France's Antoine de Saint-Exupery higher than native sons Pushkin or Tolstoy. To be fair, Mikhail Bulgakov and his beloved "Master and Margarita" still occupies the top spot.

I am not surprised about Conan Doyle and Saint-Exupery being so high on people's chosen book lists. I have written before about foreign literature being seen as something that is part of one's own in Russia and Central and Eastern Europe. In fact the list is a very fine mixture of Russian and foreign books but I am delighted to see that not only Crime and Punishment but the wonderful Soviet satire The Twelve Chairs by Ilf and Petrov have attained high position.

I have an odd suspicion that Ilf and Petrov's satire will not be passed by the eagle-eyed censor-in-chief, though it is undoubtedly a classic. Conan Doyle? Well, who knows? Perhaps he will feel nostalgic about his childhood. But will George Orwell make the mark, as one Moscow wit has asked.

One writer who will not be on that list though he is highly regarded by Russians and non-Russians is Boris Akunin, whose real name is Grigory Chkhartishvili. He wrote his first detective stories about the nineteenth century investigator Erast Fandorin under the pseudonym B. Akunin (get it?) but then expanded it to Boris Akunin. He has written a very large number of complicated and very literary novels, including one called F.M., which I have not yet managed to get through, though I was given a copy soon after it came out.

As far as Mr Putin is concerned, however, the most notable fact about Boris Akunin is not his stupendous literary output but that he joined those who protested against the Duma elections of last December. It could only be because he is of Georgian origin, opined the great literary critic. Akunin responded in an interview

I'm not taking this seriously. That is how he was trained in his special [KGB] school. It is his normal method of smearing an opponent. I don't feel smeared. OK, I'm Georgian, so what? There are people of many ethnicities in our country. Actually, he was hinting that since I'm an ethnic Georgian, it means I'm an enemy of Russia. That is what he meant....

Not taking the once and future President's opinions seriously? Dear me.