Blogging the democratic revolution
Recently, two Russia blogs we admire, Sean????????s Russia Blog and Vilhelm Konnander????????s Weblog, have leveled harsh charges of anti-democracy at Kazakhstan, charges that unfortunately tell only half that country????????s story and fail to give a fair sense of the broader geopolitical context. The charges were apparently prompted by a recent comment by U.S. President George Bush while hosting a state visit by the nation????????s leader that Kazakhstan was a ???????free country.??????? Sean and Vilhelm argue that Kazakhstan is run by a dictator who should be actively confronted, rather than supported and encouraged, by the Bush administration. To be sure, Kazakhstan…
Vyacheslav Mizin and Alexander Shaburov are a pair of Russian artists who produce work such as the image above under the name ???????Dark-blue Noses??????? (???????????????????? ?????????????????). They have represented Russia at the Venice Biennale and shown widely in Russia and internationally. The Matthew Bown Gallery of London scheduled a show of their work for November 9th through December 2nd and last week the gallery????????s owner, Matthew Bown, traveled to Moscow to meet with the artists and select works for the exhibition. When he appeared at the Moscow International Airport last Friday with the above image in his possession (as well…
Amid escalated confrontation with Russia and no perspective of things getting better there Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili is apparently trying to guarantee himself and his ruling United National Movement (UNM) from surprises due to a possible Moscow involvement. Saakashvili asked the parliament to cut his term by several months and hold parliamentary and presidential elections simultaneously early in 2008. By uniting two election campaigns Saakashvili, who????????s widely expected to stay for the next term, hopes to help his party win a clear majority in the parliament while his popularity will be still high. This is exactly what the opposition doesn????????t…
Under Ceausescu and Gheorghe Gheorghiu Dej regime (Dej was the political mentor of Ceausescu) 250,000 Jews have been sold by Romania. The German ethnics who held the Romanian citizenship were also sold to the West Germany. Aside from the financial transaction, Ceausescu asked Israel to smooth the relations of Romania with the United States. This is just one more despicable act of the Romanian communists. Israel paid cash for the Jews who wanted to leave Romania, but also with technology and by lobbying in Ceausescu????????s favor in Washington DC. After 1967, Romania was the only communist country who did not…
Israeli President Moshe Katsav is currently facing charges for rape. Recently, an Israeli diplomatic delegation including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert visited Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. An article from the Russian newspaper Kommersant quoted Putin as follows, speaking to the group: “?????????????????????????? ?????????????????????????????????????? ???????????????????????? ??????????????????????????????????????????! ???????????????????????????????? ????????????????????? ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????! ?????????????????????????? ????????????????????????? ????????????????????????????????????????????! ???? ???????????????????????????? ???????? ???????????????????????? ????????? ????????????????! ???????? ???????????? ????????????????? ????????????????????????! ????????? ???????????? ???????????? ????????????????????????????????!” In a New York Times story, this remark is characterized as “flippant” and reported as follows: According to journalists and officials in the room and published accounts by Agence France-Presse late Wednesday and Kommersant…
Ranks are beginning to close on the question of Vladimir Putin????????s Russia in the West????????s pro-democracy circles. The question is no longer whether action is required but rather what action, how and when. Last week, Publius Pundit documented the importance of two watershed events in Russia, the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the onset of a Russian pogrom against Georgian children in Russia, in signaling a sea change in the country????????s political course. On the same day we published, the respected pro-liberty think tank CATO Institute announced that it was creating a new Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity…
Between them, Russia and China account for 17% of the world????????s territory (roughly 26 million square miles out of about 150 million total) and nearly 25% of its population (almost 1.5 billion people out of over 6 billion total). Yet, the two countries only account for 7% of the world????????s nominal economy ($3 trillion out of $44.5 trillion). True, they account for 17% of the world????????s economy adjusted for ???????purchasing power parity??????? ($10.5 trillion out of $60.7 trillion), but even here their share of wealth lags far behind their share of the population, and the idea of ???????purchasing power parity???????…
Over the weekend, the anti-democratic crisis brewing in Russia took a horrifying turn for the worse. On Friday, the Associated Press reported that the Moscow police were circulating requests to primary schools requesting that they be provided with lists of all students with Georgian-sounding last names; the orders came in the wake of the forcible deporation of more than 100 Georgians from Russia as the start of a massive campaign. The AP gave an example: ???????Nina Zubareva, an official from school No. 1289 in northern Moscow, told the AP that on Thursday, the local police station telephoned and demanded a…
At VCrisis, Alek Boyd has firsthand info about how Hugo Chavez’s shiny new Russian weapons purchases are being used – to massacre Venezuelan and Brazilian peasants from helicopters in the deep jungle. There was a great big massacre of miners in the Amazon rainforest this week and Boyd is on the scene with tons of photos and interviews with locals. These are Hugo Chavez’s death squads up close. Death squads from the air, with the willing collaboration of Vladimir Putin. Read the whole thing here.
As Publius Pundit readers know, a crisis is brewing in Georgia. After discovering a spy ring seeking to subvert the current pro-West presidential administration on Russia????????s behalf, just as Georgia entered the final round of talks on NATO membership, the Georgian government took action to arrest the conspirators, who included several Russian military officers. In response, Russia has recalled its ambassador and imposed a trade and travel blockade on tiny Georgia, seeking to destabilize its economy. More recently, it has loosed a pogrom-like assault on Georgian-owned businesses and assets in Russia, as well as a series of crude attacks on…
If chills did not run down your spine when you heard the tune for the Soviet national anthem, written to glorify the mass-murdering dictator Joseph Stalin, playing for Russia at the Winter Olympics this year in Italy, if you do not shiver every time you hear about Russian people favoring Vladimir Putin, a proud KGB spy, with 70%-plus approval in opinion polls, then perhaps you are ready for this: Russia is re-weaponizing psychiatry as a method of dealing with anti-Kremlin dissent, just as in Soviet times. Two major articles from leading newspapers have documented the early stages of the phenomenon.…
The Moscow Times newspaper maintains an impressive stable of pundits analyzing Russian political developments, and their weekly columns are often required reading for those who wish to understand and properly respond the rise of the Neo-Soviet Union. Two recent examples deal with the disturbing and self-destructive rise of official anti-Americanism in Russia: Georgy Bovt documents its rise in the Russian Duma, while Alexander Golts explains its new significance in the Russian military. Bovt writes: Last week, a remarkable document titled “On a Likely Scenario of Action of the United States toward Russia in 2006-2008” was circulated in the State Duma.…
We have previously discussed the question of Russia????????s membership on the G-8 panel; given Russia????????s feeble economic performance and, more importantly, its widespread corruption and anti-democratic politics, it is virtually impossible to offer any cogent argument in favor of membership. Russia simply is not qualified. However, there is a second major question which is harder to resolve. Should Russia be admitted to the World Trade Organization? The WTO is not analogous to the G-8; it is a populist body, not an elitist one, and Russia????????s issues of democracy and corruption are less relevant here since there are some countries with…
A string of high-level surveys of social development over the past year have equated Russia????????s level of achievement with that of the African nation of Niger, a landlocked sub-Saharan state of 14 million roughly half of whose national budget is derived from foreign aid. In October of last year the ???????Corruption Perceptions Index??????? from the German think tank Transparency International surveyed 159 nations and found that only 30 (less than 19%) were less corrupt than Russia. Russia found itself tied for 9th most corrupt nation in the world with Niger and Sierra Leone. Then in June, Foreign Policy????????s ???????Failed States…
In my view the strongest force of all . . . was that unmistakable sense of unanimity among the peoples of the world that war must somehow be averted. The peoples of the British Empire were at one with those of Germany, of France and of Italy, and their anxiety, their intense desire for peace, pervaded the whole atmosphere of the conference, and I believe that that, and not threats, made possible the concessions that were made. I know the House will want to hear what I am sure it does not doubt, that throughout these discussions the Dominions, the…
In a moment where the forces of dictatorship and tyranny seem to be pushing back against democracy, the common thread that has successfully aligned nations such as Iran, Russia, Venezuela, China, and Sudan have been the supply and demand of energy. While it is encouraging that the relationships forged seem to be more based on Machiavellian pragmatism then aligned ideologies or long term goals, problematic occurrences and diplomatic realignment have debilitated the West????????s efforts to act against undemocratic forces. Increasingly, the ability to act as a geopolitical actor has been taken away from the United States and the UN as…
On September 3rd a disturbing number of negative developments in the area of human rights and democracy have were reported in Russia. First, Human Rights Watch issued a report detailing how Russian prosecutors railroaded two former detainees at Guantanamo Bay that the U.S. foolishly released to Russia’s clutches when Russia claimed they were terrorists. The sham trials that resulted were pathetic spectacles of the classic Neo-Soviet variety, based on “confessions” that were beaten out of the suspects. HRW stated: “Police in Russia frequently use torture and ill-treatment to extract confessions.” It concluded that torture is so omnipresent in Russia that…
Deep sea oil rig, Gulf of Mexico Source: National Aeronautics & Space Administration Today, a quiet revolutionary time bomb was presented to Hugo Chavez. He has no idea what it is or what it means. But this gift means it’s all over for the brutal Venezuelan tyrant in the next few years. He won’t be bothering us anymore. He won’t be bothering anyone anymore. He’s finished. Treasure was discovered in America’s Gulf of Mexico waters today, black gold so vast and so deep and so surprising and so recoverable that overnight, America’s energy reserves have just increased as much as…
The shocking news was reported by RIA Novosti on August 30th that Russia????????s most prominent and well-respected newspaper, Kommersant (???????the Merchant???????), had been sold to Alisher Usmanov (pictured below), the owner of the Metalloinvest and Gazprominvestholding holding companies, the latter a subsidiary of Kremlin-controlled Gazprom. Usmanov is an Uzbek-born oligarch who has served six years in prison for fraud. RIA also reported that ???????Gazprom Media, the division of the state-owned energy giant, has in recent years taken control of once independent television station NTV, its satellite division NTV+, regional broadcaster TNT, Echo of Moscow (Ekho Moskvy) radio station, broadsheet Izvestia…
Another domino falls. Another symbol, if not the representative of Russian independent media, has been scooped up by a Kremlin ally. The business daily, Kommsersant was sold this week for $300 million to Alisher Usmanov. Usmanov is the owner of Owner of Oskol Steel Mill, the Ural Steel industrial complex, the Lebedinsky Iron Ore Mining and Processing Facility, and Mikhailovsky GOK (he and his partner Vasiliy Anisimov acquired the latter in the beginner of 2005. Ranked the 25th richest man in Russia and the 278th in the world by Forbes with a net worth of $2.6 billion, the 52 year…
RIA Novosti reported on August 30th that “Russia’s GDP growth of 5.5% in the first quarter of 2006 was the highest among the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations for the period.” Relying on data from the IMF, Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service “said real year-on-year GDP growth in Russia during the first quarter reached 5.5%, compared to 3.7%, 3.4% and 3.3% in the United States, Japan and Canada, respectively. The rate was 2.3% in Great Britain, 1.7% in Germany, and 1.5% in France and Italy.” To its credit, RIA also reported that “Russia’s GDP still falls well behind other…
One of the most ominous questions hovering over democratic politics in the world today is how harsh an anti-democratic crackdown Russian dictator Vladimir Putin would be prepared to support in order to maintain control over the Russian population in the event of an economic downturn. Recently, Putin has been recording 70+% approval in public opinion surveys, owing largely to the perception that under his stewardship the Russian economy has become much more vibrant. Leave aside the fact that this perception is wholly inaccurate, since virtually all of Russia’s economic growth is attributable to rising world energy prices that Putin had…
Ruins of a Russian jet crash which killed 170, Aug. 22, 2006 Source: Associated Press, via Yahoo! News On Tuesday morning (August 22) it was reported by the Associated Press and Reuters that a Russian passenger jet, a Pulkova Airlines TU-154 airliner bound from the Black Sea resort of Anapa to St. Petersburg, crashed in Ukraine with 171 people on board. This comes after a July crash in the Russian city of Irkutsk of a Russian A-310, operated by the Russian carrier S7, killing 124 passengers and crew, and it is the third crash the region this year. In May,…
Next week will mark 15 years since the August Putsch. On August 19, 1991 a group of Soviet politicians calling themselves the State Executive Committee (Gosudarstvennyi Komitet po Chezvychainomu polozheniiu, GKChP) attempted to seize power in Moscow. The ???????putsch??????? took a very Soviet form. The Committee announced that Gorbachev was ill and was relieved of his position while he was on vacation in Sochi. Soviet Vice-President Gennady Yanayev was named in his place. The precedent for removing GenSeks while on vacation was set with Khrushchev????????s sacking in 1964. The real reason for the move was that Gorbachev and his counterparts…
According to an article in today’s Guardian Unlimited, United Russia, the largest Russian political party by far, is losing its appeal with the electorate. It seems that the party’s narrow platform, to support the President in every way, is something of a turn-off. So, what is to be done? ‘Create another…ÄpartyÅ…that pretends to be an opponent.’ Yes, Putin is going to manufacture an ‘opposition’ party…controlled by the Kremlin of course. This is another wonderful example of managed democracy in Russia. As Andrew Wilson wrote in his book Virtual Politics, the Russian words often translated managed democracy are better translated directed…