hack attack!

So you know how the Western commentariat carries on about how Russia Today fawns over the Kremlin and propagates anti-Western propaganda, while shamelessly peddling itself as a paragon of universal truth and uncompromising objectivity? Welcome to the next installment in the never-ending annals of Western media hypocrisy, brought to you courtesy of Dorothée Olliéric, hack zhurnalizdka extraordinaire of state TV station France 2.

On the morning of August 10, at the height of the Great Russian Heatwave, Olliéric contacted Alexandre Latsa, a Moscow-based French blogger*, through Facebook. “I’m in Moscow again for a few days,” she said,  ”I’m looking to interview someone on the failure of the Putin system in this crisis, if possible a blogger who goes to the real news away from Russian state TV, etc”. After a few hours, in response to Latsa’s queries, she clarified that the interview’s purpose would be to link the news on the wildfires and deaths to “explain the failure of Putin’s system” and on how to get access to information in a country where the state “says nothing, hides everything”. She concluded by asking Latsa if he or a Russian friend could participate in an interview.

In the late evening, she asked Latsa if he had received her message and asked him if he could do an interview the next morning on the subject of “bloggers who are looking for true information to report on the crisis and on the failures of the Putin system”. After failing to get a response after a little more than an hour, a seemingly flustered Olliéric wrote, “Well then Alexandre, no longer responding to France 2???”

You can find Latsa’s answer to Olliéric in French, Russian and English at his post France2 – Франс 2 и Я… In my view, this fictionalized response from Olliéric, written by one of the commentators, just about sums it all up: “I’m too lazy and incompetent to do my dirty work myself, so I’m looking for someone who is silly enough to do my dirty work for me and lowly enough to distort the facts to please my editor… If I fail to cook the story his boss wants, I’ll fail to sell it to my editor. And if my stories fail to sell with my editor at France 2, I’ll be outta my job faster than you can say independent western media“.

In the event, the presenter Olliéric had to do most of the cooking herself. On the next day, the day that Latsa’s interview may have been, she was “semi-obsessively repeating the assertion that Putin’s system failed” and (falsely) claiming that the Kremlin wasn’t accepting international aid.**

As I noted in my own post on Russia’s torrid summer, the main reason for the savage wildfires was the unprecedented magnitude of the heatwave, which may have been the most severe to hit Central Eastern Europe in 15,000 years! Barring findings to the contrary by objective researchers – as opposed to the hack journalism purveyed by Dorothée Olliéric or Julia Ioffe (who even found a way to blame the poor Mongols!) – it is not unreasonable to posit that, in general, the Russian state made the best it could out of a bad situation.

Yes, I know. There were many cases of of unresponsive authorities, of information censorship, of outright corruption in saving the homes of rich dacha owners before state property. But consider this from another angle. Why did more than three times fewer Russians die of wildfires than did Australians in their (milder) Black Saturday bushfires last year?

Ultimately, even most Russians themselves – the people, you know, who actually had to live with the wildfires – would disagree with the stories peddled by the Western media about them. The two most attributed causes of the wildfires, according to an opinion poll by Levada, were the unprecedented severity of the heatwave and the Soviet-era policies of draining the peat bogs. And, contrary to the many proclamations floating about last month that the regime’s popularity was crumbling in the heat, the latest approval ratings indicate that the wildfires made nary a dent in the tandem’s political fortunes.

* And latter-day Walter Duranty, if Ukrainian nationalists are to be believed.

** For more on the rigorous standards of French coverage of Russia’s wildfires, see also Le Figaro et la Russie… ou comment des grévistes de la faim sont choisis pour illustrer la canicule.

Peter Lavelle: In His Own Words…

What first sparked your interest in journalism and Russia, and how did the twain meet?

The reason I started to write about Russia – circa 1999 – came about for two reasons. First, having an education in Eastern European and Russian history gave me a reason to write about where I lived. I didn’t like much of what the commentariat was writing on contemporary Russia. The second reason was to earn some money, which later led to needing to make a living.

I came to Russia to live in late 1997. I was employed as an equity analyst at what was then called Alfa Capital. I was lured to Russia by my former boss (an American) I worked with in Poland. I never wanted to move to Russia – actually I must say I was rather adverse to Russia, having lived in eastern Europe for about 12 years. As a result of the financial crisis of 1998, I was given a generous severance package. This allowed me to stay in Russia for a while without worrying too much about money. In spring of 2000 I started to work for a small Russian bank. The money wasn’t great, but at least the bank organized and paid for my visa. Plus, I had time to write now and then. It was at this time I discovered the JRL – Johnson’s Russia List. I have been hooked on (even an addict to) Russia watching ever since.

So you ask “how did the twain meet?” I was furious with what some journalists passed off as serious analysis and commentary on Russia and I was given opportunities to express myself as a corrective to what I thought was awful journalism. The synthesis is me today (and not just regarding Russia).

My first stop was the Russia Journal. It wasn’t much of a newspaper, but I sure did write a lot for it and really enjoyed it. Then UPI’s former Moscow bureau chief asked me to come on board as a stringer – I was thrilled. That was the first time I called myself a journalist.

Later, I wrote for Asia Times Online and – yes! – for Radio FreeEurope/Radio Liberty. Being published in “Current History” was also a special benchmark for me as a journalist.

This was also the first time I started butting heads with the commentariat. I would like to point out that this is way before I had anything to do with Russian state (funded) media. Please remember my Untimely Thoughts newsletter was going full blast during all of this.

And for all those interested: I started to work at RIAN (2005) becauseI was tired of the “slave wages” UPI was paying and for problems associated with getting a new visa. Thus, I had very practical reasons to make this move.

It is simply not true I went to RIAN (later RT) due to “ideological” motivations. I had already settled in Russia and wanted to stay settled. My journalism in front of a camera today differs little from the journalism I practiced in print years before RT came into existence.

What were your best and worst experiences as a Russia journalist?

The highlight of my career to date in journalism, in which I include television, was covering Georgia’s aggression against South Ossetia in August 2008. I was in the news studio hour after hour, day in and day out. I lived on cigarettes and coffee, and with very little sleep. Watching such a story from the start and unfold was exhilarating. I am proud to say RT did an excellent job and that we at RT got the story right from the beginning when other news outlets either got it wrong or played catch-up (following RT’s lead of course!).

Having my own television program (aired three times a week) remains a great highlight. I dreamed (or day dreamed) of having such an opportunity at a very early age watching the Sunday political chat shows in the US. So dreams can come true, I suppose.

What is my worst experience? This will surprise you: not getting paid for my work. I have lost count of the number of articles I wrote without being compensated when I was still in print journalism. Today I can write for media outlets without asking for compensation – a wonderful position to be in.

I would like to also mention that while not directly under the category of “worst experience” I can say an on-going “unpleasant experience” is being called “Putin’s mouth piece” or the “Kremlin’s tool.” I speak my mind, I have always done this. Anyone acquainted with my long lost friend – my Untimely Thoughts newsletter – knows I have changed very little over the years. Television has not changed me; it has only allowed me to amplify my worldview.

Who are the best Russia commentators? Who are the worst?

Who are the best? There are some really great ones – ones that come to mind immediately: Patrick Armstrong, Vlad Sobell, Thomas Graham, Eugene Ivanov, Dale Herspring, Stephen Cohen, Paul Sauders, Dmitry Sims, Anatol Lieven, Mary Dejevsky, and Chris Weafer (and of course you Anatoly!).

Who are the worst? I think it is pointless to answer this question. Among the commentariat there is a small cottage industry that regularly condemns me – everyone reading this interview knows who I am referring to. To this day not one aspersion said or written about me warrants my reply. These are small minded people and most of them are journalists because they lack the ability and talent to do anything else. These are the worst kind of people – they get along by going along. When it comes to writing about Russia, the majority of them don’t have the guts to stand alone and speak up.

What is your favourite place in Russia? Is there anywhere you haven’t been yet, but would love to visit?

I love and hate Moscow! Moscow is my home so I make the best of it. Because of my CrossTalk program, I very rarely travel anymore. In fact, I have seen very little of this vast country. I have visited various cities between Moscow and St Petersburg and down south as far as Chechnya. By my own admission, I should be better travelled after so many years. I am still hoping to make it to Vladivostok.

If you could recommend one book about Russia, what would it be?

Martin Malia’s “Russia under Western Eyes” [AK: Click to buy] – I can’t remember how many times I have read this great tome, but each time I do I learn something new to reflect upon.

Do you think today’s Russian media environment is better than in 1999? The late 1980′s? Are Russian journalists freer or safer than they were before?

Comparing Russian media of the 80’s to the 90s to the 00s is not very constructive. The ending of Soviet era censorship was a great moment for Russians and Russian society. Some embraced honest and professional journalism; others practiced this trade with regrettable irresponsibility.

The way I look at Russia’s media transition – and the journey is long from over – is through the prism of business models. In the 80s the state’s monopoly had to be broken and eventually was. In the 90s the oligarchs divided up among themselves huge media empires – none ofwhich had any interest in real journalism or the social good. These media empires were political tools that terribly damaged journalism as a trade, profession, the political environment and even the world of business.

Since about 2000 (circa Putin), media in Russia is very much a business and a very profitable one at that! Today media caters more to audience interests and tastes – mostly entertainment (particularly when it comes to television). Is this good? Does this make a better society? Are people well enough informed? On the whole I don’t see Russian media being all that different from other media markets in the world. Russians – like their global counterparts – are well enough informed about their environment to make rational decisions about their lives. There is plenty of diversity, though one has to make an effort to satisfy interests beyond Russia’s mainstream.

As for the safety of journalists in Russia: this is a very painful and even shameful state of affairs. The police and judiciary need to do much more for journalists. Their inability to prosecute those behind high profile murders hurts journalism as a profession and public trust in state authorities.

Also, I want to point out that journalists are killed more likely because of “kompromat” being investigated or written about someone else’s money – not politics in its normative sense. In Russia money is everything – politics is a sideshow that amuses Russia’s hopelessly retarded liberal intelligentsia.

On balance, do you think Putinism was good or bad for Russia? (Try not to sit on the fence here).

I don’t like the term “Putinism.” There is no such “ism.” Russia is going through what I call the “post-soviet purgatory” – and doing well at that by my estimation, considering the other post-soviet states.

Vladimir Putin is the best thing to happen to Russia in its modern history – he is a rational person and a true patriot. Because of Putin, Russians are freer and richer now than any time since the Russian state came into existence centuries ago. Putin saved the Russian state from thieving oligarchs and their highly paid western advisors. Putin reconstructed the Russian state, was behind the creation of a middle class, and Russia’s dignified turn to the world stage. And he rightfully fought terrorism in the Caucasus when the West hoped for the slow and painful collapse of the Russian state in the wake of the Soviet collapse.

Putin is also the indirect creation of western hubris and the gross irresponsibility of Russia’s self-hating cappuccino-drinking liberals. Russia doesn’t need to be lectured by an outrageously hypocritical West, especially American posturing. Putin is the antithesis of Western hypocrisy and history will be very kind to him. Russians give him a lot of credit and he deserves it.

How will Russia-West relations be affected by Obama’s “reset” policy and Medvedev’s new emphasis on modernization? Which was the main party responsible for their deterioration in the first place?

The so-called “re-set” is a media strategy and in a sense a fraud – it has nothing to do with reality or political facts on the ground. Washington caved to reality – the American empire is collapsing. To slow the inevitable, Washington needs Moscow’s help. Out of self-interest Russia is willing to engage Obama. Pragmatic Russia today is helping Soviet Amerika out of a mess of its own making.

Most of the world’s problems can’t be resolved without Russia’s involvement – Washington now acknowledges this. Moscow does not give a hoot about Obama or the US. What Moscow does care about is how the world will evolve as the US deals with its own and much needed, but rarely spoken about, perestroika. The US is in decline and Russia (along with the emerging world) is readying itself for the inevitable paradigm shift.

Lastly, Russia and the US are not enemies, but they are competitors at times. Competition is good for both countries – even when dealing with common problems facing the world.

If you could advise the Russian government to do one thing it isn’t already doing, what would it be?

The Russian government claims it is fighting corruption (and there are signs of this), but it is not doing nearly enough. If Russia is to modernize itself to be competitive in the global marketplace, then it must to do more to fight this cancer. If this is not done, then history will pass Russia by.

HARD Talk* with Peter Lavelle

ANATOLY KARLIN: You are a fierce critic of US policy towards the Muslim world, and its enabling of Israeli expansionism and sidelining of dissenters like Robert Fisk and Norman Finkelstein. First, could you please expound on the similarities between Russophobia and Islamophobia? Second, why are Israeli policies towards the Palestinians / Hamas worse than Russia’s towards the Chechens / Caucasus Emirate?

PETER LAVELLE: First of all, I don’t like the terms Russophobia and Islamophobia – both terms are emotive and lack precision. That said, it is obvious that Russia and Islam today serve as the West’s “other” – meaning both are feared because they are different and will not submit. It is the highest form of hubris on the part of the West to believe (even demand) that everyone in the world should be like the West. The fact is many in the world simply don’t want this. They want good education, health care, prosperity, etc., but not necessarily Western values and certainly not Western (read: American) militarism. This really annoys the West, particularly poorly educated and poorly informed Americans.

Russia sees itself as its own unique civilization. This may or may not be true, but many Russians seem to think so. Islam is obviously a civilization different from the West. Islam is experiencing a resurgence and a great deal of this resurgence is the rejection that Muslims must become more like American, Europeans, etc. I blame Western mainstream media for misleading Western audiences about Islam and the Muslim world. Tragically this is part of the grossly one-sided reporting when it comes to Israel and Greater Middle East politics.

Russia is terribly misinterpreted and misunderstood in the West. Russia is presented as the loser in the Cold War and thus should act as a defeated power. Russia refuses to do this. This infuriates many in the West. The fact is Russia and Russians liberated themselves from communism! According to the Western discourse regarding history, Russia is not repenting for the past, thus it still must be the enemy. The good news is Russia is a political fact on the ground and the West has no choice but to do business with it.

You ask: why are Israeli policies towards the Palestinians / Hamas worse than Russia’s towards the Chechens / Caucasus Emirate? You are asking me to compare apples with cement bricks!

The Israelis threw the Palestinians off their land and deny them their own state. Chechens have their republic within the Russian Federation, which is generously supported by the federal government.

Palestinians are less than second class citizens in Palestine, Chechens have the same rights as any other Russian citizen. Israel is a zionist state; Russia is a secular state protecting the religious rights of all citizens. Hamas was democratically elected; the Caucasus Emirate was not elected by anyone.

I could easily go on. As you can see I don’t see there is much of a comparison.

ANATOLY KARLIN: In my question to you about Russia-US relations, you claim the “American empire is collapsing” and allude to “Soviet Amerika” (that’s even the title of one your Crosstalk programs). Now it’s no secret that the United States has its share of problems: an overstretched military, awning budget deficits, etc. Nonetheless, we need some perspective. The US economy is still much larger than that of its nearest competitor, China (which has lots of bad loans and will be devastated if it were to pull the plug on its prime export market). The Eurozone may already be on the verge of unraveling. As for Russia, its GDP is an order of magnitude smaller than America’s.

So is it then reasonable to speculate about the collapse of Pax Americana, considering its current strength and the problems afflicting potential rivals? If it does collapse, which country or bloc will take its place, if any? Finally, have you heard of Dmitry Orlov’s idea of “the Collapse Gap” between the USSR and America today?

PETER LAVELLE: Yes, I have come across Orlov’s work and remain skeptical – he simply wants to the US to collapse. Everything you point out in your question is correct about the US. But you left out one important issue – the current weakness of America’s democracy. There is no political will in America to live within the country’s means. No one wants to sacrifice – and so many want too much without paying for it. This cannot last much longer – a couple of decades at best. America simply cannot maintain a global empire and prosperity at home. The only card up America’s sleeve is the dollar at the moment, but there is every indication that it will be replaced by a basket of currencies by mid-century.

Who will lead in the wake of America’s inevitable retreat? Hopefully the world will truly become multi-polar. Such a world is better for all of humanity. Multipolarity is better suited to dealing with issues such as climate change, food and energy security, non-proliferation, dealing with HIV/AIDs, etc. Today the world has to wait on all these issues because the US is very often the greatest barrier to positive change in world.

ANATOLY KARLIN: You say that you’re not a paid shill because you are quite sincere in your beliefs: you’re not “the man who $old his homeland”, as alleged by Russia Today’s (RT) former Tbilisi correspondant William Dunbar**. That may be so.

Nonetheless, many observers believe you and RT are hardly free of the same biases that you claim pervade the Western MSM. Though accusing you of being a “latter-day Lord Haw Haw” is surely extreme (as well as a reductio ad hitlerum), the perception definitely exists that what you call “challenging the Western media hegemony” is really just a euphemism for pushing Kremlin spin on unwitting Westerners.

First, do you think this is a valid argument? (If you use the “whataboutism” response, e.g. but the Western media is controlled too!, explain why you think that justifies Russia doing the same.) Second, if you still insist that you’re not beholden to the Kremlin, could you make three criticisms of the Medvedev-Putin tandem?

PETER LAVELLE: I knew William Dunbar and know a few of the details connected to his departure from RT. He is entitled to his opinion, though they are not opinions I agree with. Indeed, he does claim I am “the man who $old his homeland.” This only informs me that he knows little about me and my opinions.

So I will answer my critics on the compensation issue. Yes, I live a comfortable life in Moscow as far as a journalist is concerned, but that is not saying much these days! I am compensated because my work is hard, presenting truly alternative viewpoints, and promoting the station – no different from other television professionals around the world.

What does it mean to sell out one’s homeland? I am American and proud of it. Being American allows me to dissent – and I dissent all the time! RT allows me to do this when most western media outlets could never dream of giving a journalist so much free space. My program CrossTalk is my creation and I am very thankful RT management supports me. I decide the program’s topics and approve guests. I inform my boss what I am doing; I don’t ask for permission.

I don’t care what some disgruntled RT employee has to say about me. The same applies to others in the commentariat because their lack of talent or success. How often these days do I openly attack my critics? The answer is that I don’t. I am attacked and vilified because of my employer, but not my message. That is cheap.

I do not speak for RT – I can only speak for myself and my work at the television station. And let me make it clear – I don’t alway like every story RT broadcasts. At the same time I will defend the station’s commitment to being different. Again being honest – some RT reports are a bit over the top. But this is a good thing in the end – we ask our audience one basic thing: Question More. We may not always get it right, but our intention is spot on.

As far as Kremlin spin-doctoring is concerned, all I can say that this assumption is laughable. I come across this accusation all the time, but after working at RT for almost 5 years I still don’t see the evidence. Does RT present the government’s point of view? Yes, of course it does (and many other viewpoints as well). But is this “Kremlin spin-doctoring”? Obviously Russia’s political elite views the world differently from let’s say the US. Why should anyone be surprised by this? Also, anyone who has watched RT will tell you that the station is not only about politics. How can non-political stories be “Kremlin spin-doctoring”? RT wants to be and is competitive. This is because it is consciously different from its competitors.

RT doesn’t do the same. It is part of my job to watch the competition. I watch CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. CNN and BBC are wildly one-sided on most global issues compared to RT. Where I work you can come across opinions never heard by RT’s competitors. I give Al Jazeera very high points for its coverage of the Greater Middle East (though not its Russia coverage). Thus, I have no need to use the “whataboutism” argument.

You want me to prove that I am not the Kremlin’s slave and live to talk about it! I welcome this opportunity. You asked for 3 examples, well I will give you 10. Over the past 10 years Russia’s leading politicians haven’t done enough regarding:

1. Corruption at all levels.
2. Support of the older generation (pensions).
3. Repair of and construction of new infrastructure.
4. Support of small and medium size businesses.
5. Development of political parties.
6. Promotion of civil society’s role in solving social problems.
7. Over reliance on the oil and natural gas sectors.
8. Introduction of a volunteer-only military and military reform in general.
9. Finding justice in so-called high-profile murders.
10. The lack of competition in the marketplace.

I could easily go on. Russia has a lot of problems, no different from ALL OTHER countries in the world.

ANATOLY KARLIN: Global warming [deniers / skeptics] (delete as needed) like Alex Jones, Piers Corbyn and Chris Monckton – all with fairly minimal scientific credentials – get prominent coverage at RT. The entire topic of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is treated as a debate in which either side has yet to prove its case.

However, in the real world, there is a consensus: in a 2004 study, Naomi Oreskes concluded that 75% of papers backed the AGW view, while none directly dissented from it. (And the latest studies are almost always more pessimistic about the magnitude of future warming than “previously expected”.) Given the sheer amount of evidence in favor of AGW, it seems strange to put a hereditary aristocrat who calls his opponents “Hitler Youth” and organizes witch hunts on the same pedestal as climate scientists. Even though more Americans believe in creationism than in evolution, news channels don’t normally give equal weight to both sides in that “debate”, do they?

So I’m at a loss how to explain this. Does RT want to get the scoop on the Western media, even at the cost of its own credibility? Or were you guys told to spin up Climategate because global warming is expected to benefit Russia? Or do you really believe that the AGW “debate” is still far from “settled”?

PETER LAVELLE: Again you are asking me to speak for RT – I am not RT’s spokesperson. And to be frank, I find your “Or were you guys told to spin up Climategate…” insulting. The fact is many of our viewers are interested in climate change. RT follows its viewers.

Nonetheless, I am glad you ask about AGW. I have done two programs on the subject – a topic I want to learn more about. I have no problem having Piers Corbryn and Chris Monckton on my program. Could you debate them? My other guests were actually quite keen to debate them. Let me be clear about something: RT gets credibility because it gives air time to different voices. And you are right, there really is no debate on American television. That can’t be said about my CrossTalk program and RT. Speaking about different voices: I may be one of the most prominent backers of dissent in the world of television today! I am proud of that.

ANATOLY KARLIN: Thank you for answering four very HARD questions. I’ll go easy on the last one. As you told us earlier in the interview, you dreamed of having your own TV program from an early age. Your wish came true. There are many who share your dream. Some of them might even be reading this interview! What advice would you give them on becoming a made man or woman in journalism? (The mafia reference isn’t entirely whimsical: from a distance, the profession does appear distinctly cliquish.)

PETER LAVELLE: This is the hardest question of all. All I can say is if you really want to be a journalist (including a TV journalist) you have to make a huge commitment. The competition is enormous and at times talented. Be different because you really are – not because being different might sell. Start blogging and pitching your material. Be prepared for rejection – many times over before things start to happen. Stay away from attacking individuals – staying with your convictions will be enough. Don’t try to become famous, that will come with hard work and honest and fair beliefs. Be willing to learn from others. And lastly stay away from journalists – a caste of people who, for the most part, aren’t worth even having a cup of coffee with.

Back to the Future

Many Russia watchers don’t like to put their money where they mouth is. Though I’m sure you’re not the type, feel free to confirm it by making a few falsifiable predictions about Russia’s future. After a few years, we’ll see if you were worth listening to.

Ok, Peter Lavelle’s predictions:

• The current tandem will rule for the foreseable future – which is a good thing.
• The next election cycle will go smoothly – parliamentary and presidential. Fingers crossed Russia’s political parties will mature some.
• Russia will continue to recover and grow during the on-going global slump. If the US and Europe experience another turn-down, Russia will be spared.
• Over the next few years, Russia and its eastern European neighbors will continue a robust process of reconciliation.
• Russia will have to step in to play a greater role in the Greater Middle East as Washington is anything but a fair broker.
• Russia will not continue down the path of pressuring Iran regarding Tehran’s nuclear program – Russia-US relations again will be strained (though nothing like during the Bush years).
• Russia will continue to expand its influence in the Western Hemisphere, though not as a direct competitor to the US.
• NATO will start to seriously listen to Russia (as most European capitals will pretend they have never heard of Saak!).
• Mainstream western media will continue to get Russia wrong — that is an easy preduction!
• Eventually, Putin will be blamed for the oil spill in the Gulf and creating the HIV/AIDS virus.

Do you plan to revive your Untimely Thoughts blog? Could you throw us a bone about any other projects you may have in the works?

What about the future? I am having a new website created to mirror my CrossTalk program. There, I intend to return to blogging in a big way in September.

Anatoly, thanks for the interview!

And thank you too, Peter, for a brilliant interview that gives fans and critics alike a lot to chew on!

If you wish me to interview you or another Russia watcher, feel free to contact me.

* A note on HARD Talk: My job as an interviewer is be a contrarian and even a “devil’s advocate” of sorts; to air common, common-sense or germane criticisms of the interviewee’s arguments and worldview, REGARDLESS of what my opinions might or might not be. (For instance, though I criticized Peter Lavelle’s views on the collapse of “Soviet Amerika”, I’ve made the same arguments on this very site: e.g. see here, here). I hope this clarifies things for the angry person who wrote me the email accusing me of Russophobia (LOL) in my HARD Talk with A Good Treaty.

** UPDATE August 14, 2010: William Dunbar has since deleted his only comment at that Facebook Group, which is reproduced below:

William Dunbar: hi, i just resigned from RT because i was being censored about georgia, i was the tbilisi correspondent. i have to say this is among the best groups i have ever seen on facebook. peter used to have a profile, i guess he left because it was another example of the double standards of the biased western media… or maybe putin prefers myspace

After I contacted him, Dunbar said that 1) he never alleged that Peter Lavelle is ““the man who $old his homeland” and that he left the Facebook group after reading this interview, 2) the last sentence is an inside joke between Dunbar and Lavelle that is “light hearted and not had absolutely nothing to do with how much Peter may or may not be paid”, and 3) he thinks that Peter Lavelle “is a true believer”, albeit his “commentary is objectionable, prejudiced and misleading.”

In summary: 1) There is nothing the Russian government could have done to contain a natural disaster of such magnitude, 2) many of the lectures about how Russia could have done better to prepare itself would have been counter-productive had they actually been implemented, 3) the hysteria about Moscow turning into a giant morgue from heat stress and smog or radioactive ash clouds is overblown, and 4) the real problem, or rather predicament, is global warming, the effects of which are expected to transform Russia’s heartlands into Central Asia within the next few decades.

Unprecedented Drought, Reductio ad Putinum

I’m going to be using Julia Ioffe as a foil in this section (not because I hate her but because I’ve actually read her articles). In her August 5th shock piece, Russia on Fire, she writes:

A strong argument could be made for calling this disaster Putin’s Hurricane Katrina. In 2006, then-President Putin, in consultation with the Russian timber industry, “reformed” forestry regulations, eliminating positions for rangers, making each of the remaining ones responsible for more territory, increasing paperwork so they spent hardly any time outdoors monitoring the forests—and, on the off chance that they did spot a small fire while on patrol, making it a punishable offense (a misuse of state funds) to put it out.

So assume that the Kremlin had listened to forestry expert Ioffe, and restarted the Soviet practice of forest fire suppression whenever they sprang up. That would have solved the problem, right? No. It would have made it a lot worse.

Left alone, forests experience small, contained fires every few years, which clear out excess undergrowth, replenish the soil and maintain the resilience of the forest ecosystem. But as soon as you start playing Canute to the woodlands, layers of dead biomass accumulate on the forest bed. Eventually, it reaches such a critical mass that the next heatwave is bound to create a conflagration, made catastrophic of the interventionist’s own hubris.

But that too would inevitable have been the Kremlin’s fault, according to the Gospel of Julia. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. In her discourse, the main things are personalities, Tsar-Batyushka, the Tatar-Mongol yoke… As Mark Chapman remarked on AGT’s blog:

If Russia’s leaders stay remote and aloof from their subjects, they’re cold and indifferent. If they make any attempt, even one that looks suspiciously scripted, to connect, they’re Janus-faced Tsars.

Now I’m not denying the possibility that the current fire suppression efforts have been riddled with corruption and incompetence. Time will tell. But consider this from another angle. This drought is unprecedented in its severity for at least the last 140 years, if not the last 500! Some much needed facts and figures (as opposed to anecdotes) from Jeff Masters:

At 3:30 pm local time today, the mercury hit 39°C (102.2°F) at Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport. Moscow had never recorded a temperature exceeding 100°F prior to this year, and today marks the second time the city has beaten the 100°F mark. The first time was on July 29, when the Moscow observatory recorded 100.8°C and Baltschug, another official downtown Moscow weather site, hit an astonishing 102.2°F (39.0°C). Prior to this year, the hottest temperature in Moscow’s history was 37.2°C (99°F), set in August 1920. The Moscow Observatory has now matched or exceeded this 1920 all-time record five times in the past eleven days, including today. The 2010 average July temperature in Moscow was 7.8°C (14°F) above normal, smashing the previous record for hottest July, set in 1938 (5.3°C above normal.) July 2010 also set the record for most July days in excess of 30°C–twenty-two. The previous record was 13 such days, set in July 1972. The past 24 days in a row have exceeded 30°C in Moscow, and there is no relief in sight–the latest forecast for Moscow calls for high temperatures near 100°F (37.8°C) for the next seven days. …

Dr. Rob Carver has done a detailed analysis of the remarkable Russian heat wave in his latest post, The Great Russian Heat Wave of July 2010. A persistent jet stream pattern has set up over Europe, thanks to a phenomena known as blocking. A ridge of high pressure has remained anchored over Russia, and the hot and dry conditions have created helped intensify this ridge in a positive feedback loop. As a result, soil moisture in some portions of European Russia has dropped to levels one would expect only once every 500 years.

Furthermore, consider the vast territorial extent of Eurasia’s drought.

[Russia blanketed by forest fire smoke. Source: NASA.]

In retrospect, the current death toll from the fires, at 50, might well be remarkably low, considering the extreme circumstances (compare with 173 deaths in the Black Saturday bushfires last year in Australia, a country Russia’s critics would all consider “civilized” and developed).

But what do I know? According to Julia Ioffe and Foreign Policy, forest fires only happen in countries with non-liberal Presidents.

Moscow Morgues & Radioactive Ash Clouds

Two rather hysterical stories doing the rounds. Make no mistake: premature deaths from heat stress are tragic. Moscow’s mortality rate rose by 29.7% in July 2009, relative to the same period last year. August might be even worse if the searing temperatures continue into next week. The morgues are overflowing, with the numbers of daily deaths multiplying by 2-7x over normal in recent days (the sources differ).

But this does happen when record-breaking heat waves strike, anywhere. I was unfortunate enough to be in Paris during the 2003 heatwave, when temperates hit 40C and more. It was a torrid hell of heat and concrete: I remember taking several cold showers per day and avoiding sun-drenched spaces like a vampire. But I had it good. People with pre-existing medical conditions were dying early. The French capital observed a 142% mortality increase in August 2003, with deaths spiking to 2-8x their normal levels during the week of the heat wave.

[Number of deaths in Paris during August 2003 heatwave.]

But at least Parisians are more used to hot summers and didn’t have to contend with the smoke. Neither can be said for Muscovites. So a high number of excess deaths – estimated to reach 40,000 by Jeff Masters – is regrettable, but to be expected.

[The 2003 European Heatwave and the Great Russian Heat Wave of 2010 compared.]

What about the fires releasing radioactive ashclouds from the areas around Chernobyl? Pure hysteria. Even if the inferno spread there, the radioactive particles released in 1986 have long since become diluted in the environment. Rinse and repeat if taken on an airborne ride by the fires a second time.

The Real Meaning of the Great Russian Heatwave of 2010

Most commentators prefer to spend their time discussing Putin’s ownage of the Sovok citizen blogger or the destruction of the naval aviation storage base that spawned a firestorm of blame and recriminations. It certainly doesn’t shed a good light into the nefarious workings of the Russian bureaucracy (few things do), but guys, this is largely irrelevant. What’s really significant is that this once-in-a-century (or is now once-in-a-millennium?) drought is a symptom of global warming, a few more degrees of which will transform the Russian heartlands into Central Asia.

So here are the really important things:

1. The collapse of Russia’s grain production, estimated to fall from 100mn tons in 2009 to just 65mn tons this year. This is huge. It reverses practically all the agricultural revival (in volume output) achieved in the past few years, bringing Russia back (maybe even below) its post-Soviet agricultural nadir. Furthermore, the depression may continue for another two years, if the earth is baked too hard for sowing the winter crop: a nation accounting for 25% of the world’s wheat exports will be out of business for two years. Coupled with agricultural decline in other countries (e.g. floods in China to reduce its rice crop by 5-7% this year) and rising food protectionism, social welfare in poor food importers like Egypt and Pakistan will plummet. The conditions aren’t in place for a repeat of the 2008 food crisis, but this does confirm that our age is now one of increasing scarcity.

2. This year is unprecedented everywhere: it is the hottest July on record (and the hottest year on record). Thermometers have been snapping left, right and center as new temperature records are set from Belarus to Sudan. The Arctic has given up the ghost, with sea ice volume plummeting into oblivion.

["Daily Sea Ice volume anomalies for each day are computed relative to the 1979 to 2009 average for that day. The trend for the 1979- present period is shown in blue. Shaded areas show one and two standard deviations from the trend."]

This is despite the fact that we are at a periodic, deep minimum in solar irradiance. One can only imagine the kind of havoc we’ll see in 2012-15 as it bounces back to its maximum.

And that’s not all the bad news. The Russian fires will have burned an unholy amount of biomass, which is even now making its way into the atmosphere in the form of CO2. Historically, heatwave years are associated with above-average increases in atmospheric CO2 as the carbon cycle reverses direction. It is not impossible that 2010 will be the first year in which atmospheric CO2 increases by more than 3ppm (the previous record was 2.93ppm in 1998, a scorcher year that saw massive peat bog fires in Borneo).

The general agricultural and climate crisis is the context in which Russia’s wildfires must be framed.

3. The extent to which Russia benefits from global warming surely ought to be reassessed. Most climate models predicted a moderate increase in agricultural output on the cold Eurasian steppes with up to 2C of warming, making up for declining yields in the mid-latitudes and tropics. These assumptions might have to be reassessed if Russia’s Black Earth metamorphoses into a Dust Bowl. Though mass migration to the Arctic is a possible (and probably inevitable in the long-term) adaptation, it needs generations to be effected.

The preparations have to begin now. The sooner Putin and Medvedev realize this, the more favorably history will judge them; minor things will be forgotten. (I intend to write a post on Russia’s future as an Arctic civilization sometime in the next few weeks).

Russia is unlikely to ever have problems feeding itself, as long as its agricultural policies remain more or less sane. Nonetheless, its massive drought (which may become the norm rather than the exception sooner rather later) and grain export ban indicate it’s unwise to rely on it to bring big food surpluses to the global dinner table in the next few decades.

UPDATE, August 10: So it really is not just a one in a hundred years but a once in a thousand years event: Russian Meteorological Center: There was nothing similar to this on the territory of Russia during the last one thousand years in regard to the heat.

The Triumvirate and the First Ten

According to the official version, Russia is a democratic country, consensually governed by the “tandem” of lawfully elected President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin. The semi-official version says that the two halves of the “tandem” are in fact equal: since Putin is older and more experienced, he is also more “equal” and more important than his protégé in the Presidency.

The second account is closer to the real state of affairs, but it’s inaccurate even so. The pinnacle of power isn’t occupied by a “tandem” or duumvirate, but by a triumvirate composed of Putin, Sechin and Medvedev. The President isn’t even the second man in the hierarchy, but only the third. Although some politogists rank Medvedev fourth (after Viktor Ivanov) or even fifth (after Sergey Naryshkin, or Aleksandr Bortnikov, or Vladislav Surkov, or even Roman Abramovich), these are sensationalist exaggerations.

The real hierarchy and functions of Russia’s highest bureaucrats have no relation to their nominal positions. Vladimir Putin is called Prime Minister, but in reality he’s the Sovereign, our Tsar-Batyushka – while not a sole autocrat or absolute monarch, his power is unconstitutional; and though constrained, it is not by the constitution or the laws, but by corporate-clique traditions (not dissimilar from mafia “understandings”), backstage agreements with shadowy lobbies, and family, friend and administrative connections. Furthermore, not only is Putin a Tsar, he is also his own Minister of Foreign Affairs (the nominal minister, Sergey Lavrov, is nothing more than an advisor on foreign policy).

Though Igor Sechin is called the Deputy Prime Minister, it is he who is in fact the “First Minister”. He’s not quite the head of government (as not all Ministers are subject to him – several answer directly to the Sovereign), but he’s a first amongst equals nonetheless. He holds sway over vast swathes of the Russian economy (with the exception of finance) and the security organs answer to him.

On paper, Dmitry Medvedev is the President and head of stat, but in reality he’s sooner a sort of Deputy Prime Minister on a wide range of issues. Though preeminent in his domain, the legislative sector, he is but an advisor to the Sovereign on cadre questions, and not even the most influential – that honor goes to Viktor Ivanov, and maybe even Sergey Sobyanin has more influence on the appointments of governors than the President who signs to confirm them.

The responsibilities of FSB director Aleksandr Bortnikov are similar to his job description. Though he is formally subordinated to President Medvedev, his real managers are Putin and Sechin.

Although Viktor Ivanov is officially the director of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency, no matter the name of his official position in the last 15 years, he was and remains Putin’s main advisor on cadre selection. Furthermore, the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency is really the “second KGB” (the “first KGB” is Bortnikov’s FSB). This “second KGB” became necessary after the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), which had balanced the KGB during the Soviet era, fell under FSB control during Putin’s reign. Control of the MVD is exercised by the Petersburg – Karelia clan of Patrushev and Nurgaliev.

Sergey Naryshkin, the head of the Presidential Administration, should theoretically work to fulfill the President’s will. However, Naryshkin, Putin’s classmate in the KGB Higher School, is actually Medvedev’s “supervisor” on behalf of the Sovereign, Putin.

Vladislav Surkov is officially the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration, but is also informally responsible for the regime’s ideology. He holds an unofficial position that is impossible in a democratic state – Minister of Parliament and Political Parties.

The Minister of Finance Aleksey Kudrin, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov (answers on foreign economic policy) and Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Sobyanin (head of the Administration of the Russian President) also figure in the first ten of the administrative-economic oligarchy that rules Russia.

A Note on Oligarchy

An oligarchy is the collective authoritarianism of the propertied class. The single most propertied class in Russia is the higher bureaucracy, the nomenklatura. Directly (through management of state property) or indirectly (through front men, wives, children, cousins, nephews, etc) the oligarchic nomenklatura controls virtually the entire Russian economy. Their leading members are magnates of global stature – Putin in oil/gas and finance, Medvedev in paper and pulp, Sechin in oil, Sobyanin in natural gas, Shuvalov in finance, Surkov in food products, etc. This pattern is reproduced amidst the wider ranks of the regional oligarchies.

Clans, Clienteles and Coalitions

An oligarchy is never united – it is always fragmented into clans, groupings and clienteles waging civil war, as parts of temporary or more-or-less continuous coalitions. Today the main struggle is between two coalitions of administrative-economic clans, Sechin’s and Medvedev’s. The coalition centered around Sechin wants to remove Medvedev and his supporters from power and supports a third term for Putin after the 2012 elections.

In direct opposition, the Medvedev coalition aims to displace Sechin and his allies, reelect Medvedev in 2012, and transform the triumvirate into a duumvirate with Medvedev playing a more equal role in it. However, they are not much interested in Putin’s dismissal, though it is possible that for some of them it is a distant goal.

The foundation of the Sechin coalition is the union of two groups of St.-Petersburg Chekists: Sechin’s own clan and the group of Viktor Ivanov and Nikolay Patrushev (secretary of the Security Council and former head of the FSB), reinforced by a smattering of smaller clans and clienteles. Prominent figures in the Sechin clan include his protégé in the FSB Aleksandr Bortnikov, the Presidential Envoy to the Southern Federal District Vladimir Ustinov (Sechin’s son-in-law), former Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov (current First Deputy Prime Minister) and Mikhail Fradkov (current head of the Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR), Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov, the President of Rosneft Sergey Bogdanchikov and the CEO of Vneshtorgbank Andrey Kostin.

The Ivanov – Patrushev group includes Speaker of the State Duma Boris Gryzlov, deputy head of the Federal Anti-Narcotics Agency Oleg Safonov and Minister of Internal Affairs Rashid Nurgaliev. This group splits further into several sub-groups and clienteles, the more noticeable of which include the Petersburg – Karelia Chekists (Patrushev – Nurgaliev) and the Petersburg – Afghan Chekists of Viktor Ivanov (his fellow servicemen on Afghanistan). The Sechin coalition also draws in the clienteles of Sergey Naryshkin and Aleksandr Bastrykin (Chairman of the Investigative Committee of the Prosecutor General and Putin’s classmate from the Law Department of Leningrad State University). Another of Putin’s friends, Sergey Chemezov, is also part of Sechin’s coalition, with his extensive clientele of enterprise directors within the state corporation Russian Technologies, and several governors.

Medvedev’s coalition is composed of the so-called “Petersburg lawyers” (mostly Medvedev’s classmates from the Law Faculty of Leningrad State University), the “Petersburg economists”, the “Petersburg communicationists”, as well as Viktor Cherkesov’s group. The most influential of the “Petersburg lawyers” is Medvedev’s friend and former classmate, head of the Control Department of the Presidential Administration Konstantin Chuychenko. This group also includes the chairman of the Supreme Court of Arbitration and Medvedev’s lifelong friend Anton Ivanov, the Presidential Envoy to the Urals Federal District Nikolai Vinichenko, a few other lower-ranked classmates, Deputy Prime Minister and head of preparations for the Sochi Olympics Dmitry Kozak, Minister of Justice Aleksandr Konovalov, and Prosecutor General Yury Chaika (also a lawyer, though of Siberian origins).

Aleksey Kudrin leads the “Petersburg economists”, which also include Central Bank chairman Sergey Ignatyev, his first deputy Aleksey Ulyukaev, Minister of State Property Elvira Nabiullina, Director General of the state corporation Rosnano Anatoly Chubais, and advisor to the President Arkadiy Dvorkovich.

The “Petersburg communicationists” are led by Presidential advisor Leonid Reiman and his clientele (in contrast to a clan or group, which have some relatively equal personages, a clientele exhibits a more “vertical” nature: a master and his servants, the manager and his subordinates). Cherkesov’s group is also a clientele, though less so than Reiman’s because it includes the head of the President’s personal security service Viktor Zolotov and, perhaps, Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Ivanov.

Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov (“Igor Ivanovich Not Really” – as opposed to Sechin, who’s “Igor Ivanovich The Real Deal”) and head of Medvedev’s Press Service Natalia Timakova are also part of Medvedev’s coalition. Its other supporters include the moneybags Roman Abramovich and Alisher Usmanov, as well as former Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Norilsk Nickel Aleksandr Voloshin. It is possible to consider these figures as another grouping in Medvedev’s coalition, “Voloshin’s group”. Of the newly appointed regional leaders, Nikita Belykh and Dmitry Mezentsev are supporters of Medvedev and his modernization initiative.

In addition to the two main coalitions there exist individuals and groups which haven’t chosen sides, support a neutral position, or prefer to deal with Putin directly. These include the group of “Petersburg physicists” (the Kovalchuk family and the brothers Fursenko) and the “Petersburg Orthodox Chekists” (President of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin, the Presidential Envoy to the Central Federal District Georgiy Poltavchenko, and the Head of the Presidential Property Management Department Vladimir Kozhin). These groups are historically closely tied both with each other (through the St.-Petersburg Association of Joint Ventures and “Russia” Bank) and with Putin (through the “Ozero” dacha co-op).

Vladislav Surkov and his clientele also orientate themselves directly to Putin, feeding off the management of the Presidential Administration’s internal policy. Most governors – both old hands and new appointees (e.g., the new Governor of Pskov Oblast Andrey Turchak and the new President of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov) – prefer to simultaneously show fealty to Putin, loyalty to Medvedev and boundless respect for Sechin.

Though there undoubtedly exist ideological differences between the Kremlin clans, they are not the building blocks of their coalitions. It is usually considered that Medvedev’s people (especially Kudrin’s group) profess economic liberalism, whereas Sechin’s clan are proponents of dirigisme. However, the disagreement seems more theoretical than anything. In practice, and regardless of their economic views, bureaucrats support “liberalism” towards companies under their thumb, while arguing for “dirigisme” towards enterprises connected to their opponents within the apparatus.

The majority of Medvedev’s clan are relative Westernizers and moderate imperialists. In contrast, Sechin favors an alliance with China against the West, and the majority of his supporters are hawkish imperialists in their attitudes towards the former Soviet republics. That said, the views of Cherkesov, especially in foreign policy, are little different from those of his bitter enemies amongst the Sechin clan (e.g., the news group Rosbalt, which they control, beat the war drum for a march on Tbilisi in August 2008).

Though he is a relative Westernizer and fairly liberal in his internal convictions, Surkov is adamantly opposed to even the minimal modernizing reforms in the sphere of ideology and politics suggested by Medvedev’s liberal advisors from the Institute of Contemporary Development, INSOR, patronized by Timakova and financed by Reiman. Though the “Orthodox Chekists” Yakunin and Poltavchenko might sing the Cross and Russian power to the skies, and advocate a strategic blockade of America in conjunction with the Arabs-Muslims, this does not stop them from maintaining a close alliance with the Kovalchuks (moderate Westernizers, and rather indifferent to both Orthodoxy and the Arabs-Muslims) in the interests of remaining competitive in economic and internal political intrigues.

Putin is Above the Fray

Putin remains above the struggle between the two oligarchic-nomenklatura coalitions (the rivalry between which he partly organized himself) and exploits all the political advantages of this state of affairs. Historically, he is closer to the Sechin clan, especially since one of the leaders of this coalition, Viktor Ivanov, is one of his closest friends. However, on economic questions (and personally) Putin completely trusts in Kudrin, and maintains friendly relations with him; furthermore, the appointment of Medvedev as a successor would have been impossible without a certain degree of trust – greater, in any case, than towards any of his former colleagues in the KGB. No doubt Putin was afraid of bestowing the Presidential mantle onto any of them even for a short time – regardless of all the vaunted “friendship” and “brotherhood” in the intelligence services.

In his cultural and civilizational views, Putin is a Westernizer (like Kudrin or Medvedev), but has only distaste for Western-style democracy (like Sechin, Patrushev, Viktor Ivanov). In matters of foreign policy he usually occupies a middle line between Kremlin Westernizers and anti-Westernizers, hawks and moderates, but it remains unclear whether his middle of the road attitude comes from listening to opposing sides of the foreign policy debate or is a product of his own quirks and oscillations.

The Sacred Cow

There are several reasons preventing the Medvedev clan from moving against Putin (and its anti-Putin minority from speaking out against Putin openly). First, it’s simply dangerous – for the future, for business, even life and limb. Second, many members of Medvedev’s coalition feel themselves quite comfortable with Putin – some of them are even closer to Putin, than they are to Medvedev (e.g. Kudrin): it is Sechin who makes their lives hard, not Putin. Third, they aren’t sure that they would be able to keep the Chekists and other assorted siloviks in check without Putin (as of now the Army is quiet and the generals don’t stick their noses into politics, but this will not necessarily be the case forever). Fourth, they are all either unknown to ordinary Russians (from Chuychenko to Shuvalov), or unpopular (Chubais, to a lesser extent Kudrin), and they fear that without Putin, not only would they be unable to control the Chekists, but also the Russian people.

Fifth, and finally, some of them (e.g., Chubais, Kudrin, Shuvalov) understand, that they have no long-term interests binding them to Medvedev, and rightly fear that if there were neither Sechin nor Putin, nothing would stop Medvedev from scapegoating them should the need arise. Nonetheless, in Medvedev’s circle – and especially in that “circle’s circles” – there does exist a dissatisfaction with Putin and a hidden desire to deprive him of power. This dissatisfaction is more or less evidenced in the writings of Medvedev’s experts in INSOR, the speeches of official human rights activists from the Presidential Council on Developing Civil Society, and in the publications of paper and electronic media under the control of Voloshin and Usmanov.

That said, however, it isn’t clear what Medvedev himself wants: to defeat Sechin and ascend to second place in a duumvirate, or to one day become the first and only Tsar himself. It’s possible that Medvedev himself doesn’t quite know yet; in any case, he is still far from successful in his struggle for second place in the real Kremlin hierarchy.

End of translation.

Comments on “Clan War” Kremlinology

1. A bit of history. Unless I’m mistaken, this clan-based view of Russian politics gained prominence around the time Mark Ames published The Kremlin’s Clan Warfare: The Putin Era Ends in the eXile in October 2007 (at any rate its pattern was widely reproduced). According to his view, the main clans were centered around Putin, Sechin and Cherkesov.

The main differences with Pribylovsky’s (2010) version is that Putin’s guys are now Sechin’s. The “civiliki” clan around Medvedev isn’t even mentioned yet.

Then earlier this year STRATFOR came out with its own interpretation in The Kremlin Wars series.

STRATFOR is more focused around which individual is aligned with the interests of which security agency (GRU vs FSB) clan.

Now one question we need to ask is: how much of the popular commentary on the Kremlin clans is based on Pribylovsky’s work (his site anticompromat.org has painstakingly detailed biographies on Russia’s major political figures)?

2. A few notes about Pribylovsky from Wikipedia. First, his professional work is in Byzantology – very appropriate for transfering to Kremlinology, though, of course, there’s always the possibility of its special stress on conspiracy, on insiderism and byzantism, overspilling. Second, he is a Soviet era dissident: he certainly doesn’t much like the siloviks, supported Vladimir Bukovsky (who doesn’t even live in Russia) for President in 2007, and signed the (somewhat ridiculous) “Putin Must Go” petition. Third, collaborated with Yuri Felshtinsky on the book Operation Successor; the same guy also collaborated with Litvinenko on the infamous conspiracy book Blowing Up Russia, and got funded by Berezovsky (the Family oligarch who lost out to the gebenishki and really hates Putin). Fourth, the book this translation is from, Power in 2010, was “издано при поддержке National Endowment for Democracy”. This democracy/freedom promoting organization openly admits to continuing work once done by the CIA.

This is not an argument for or against. It’s context. All political analysis is colored by one’s own political biases, and in Pribylovsky’s case it is undeniably very slanted in a particular direction. This has to be taken into account when deconstructing his work.

3. Now on to the article itself:

A) There are recognizable clans, though I very much doubt they are as rigid as Pribylovsky makes them out to be. Furthermore, these internal corporate structures are not specific to the Russian state. While corporatism is certainly very overt in Russia, it’s not as if it doesn’t exist (and in a big way) in the Western democracies (e.g. in the US the elites are mostly drawn from one class and greasy palms propel them from politics to business to thinktanks and academia and back). In general, like most Russian “dissidents”, he appears to have a rather warped and rose-tinged view of how politics really works in so-called “real democracies”.

B) I don’t think Putin (let alone Sechin) is more powerful than Medvedev for the very simple reason that Medvedev can fire Putin any day of the week, while Putin can’t do the same to Medvedev.

Now as the author pointed out, it is not really in Medvedev’s interest to do so. It is believable, if not inevitable or even likely, that doing so would be the political equivalent of nuclear war in the MAD era. But even in that case, it’s a balance of terror at the pinnacle of the power vertical, not Putin as Tsar / Godfather.

Furthermore, I think Pribylovsky over-stresses the competitive element of the clan system, and bellites the capacity for cohesion and effective action that is present in all feudal-type vertical systems. What is perhaps more logical is that Putin and Medvedev do trust and respect each other, and – as they say themselves – make their decisions in concert (even though it is sometimes advantageous for them to be at odds in public, especially their whole good cop / bad cop play on foreign observers).

D) Medvedev is just not that interested in personal glory. This is my impression, but his pose and mannerisms are so overly-”Presidential”, so cringingly imperious, that they appear utterly artificial, unbelonging to the alpha male-type that has Napoleonic complexes in politics. IMO, he will not seriously try to emerge as a Tsar figure – of his own volition.

E) One very good service Pribylovsky does is expose the Medvedev the Liberal vs Putin the Bad narrative so beloved of the Western media for the sham it really is. The people you attract reflect on you. Nobody who has the likes of people like Alisher Usmanov (a rapist and maybe worse) or Viktor Cherkesov (a thuggish secret policeman) in their retinue can be an liberal “angel”, nor can someone whom Chubais supports have impeccable respect for transparency. Likewise, no-one who protects Kudrin could be an economic populist and statist, just as no-one who appointed “Medvedev the Liberal” to the Presidency can entirely be an illiberal autocrat. The game is almost never black and white, just multiple shades of gray.

4. Commentator Lazy Glossophiliac gives us his thoughts on Reading up on Russia. I agree with him that Putin is probably better than Medvedev for Russia.

A Good Treaty: In His Own Words…

Before answering any questions, let me take a second to thank Anatoly Karlin of Sublime Oblivion for taking the time to draft some very challenging questions that were very fun to (try to) answer. I tried to invent responses that were equally thought-provoking, and while I may have failed in that enterprise, I do hope to explain a little bit about the way I approach this work, which occupies a startling amount of my time.

Why did you start blogging about Russia?

I’ve been studying and working on Russia for about nine years now. Russia = bizarre, alluring, etc. I figure anyone reading my blog shares my interest in the Motherland.

I don’t expect this blog to have any impact on public policy or academic debate, but I do personally benefit a great deal from having a forum through which I can better synthesize my own ideas and listen to the responses of others.

The specific angle of AGT (the whole ‘realist’ POV) was a conscious decision I made after working in Washington for about a year. Democracy promotion, I soon discovered, has really supplanted all other approaches to foreign policy. Speaking outside this framework is the easiest way to get oneself painted as un-American and pro-dictatorship. This is largely a sham, since the United States has hardly stopped cooperating with nasty foreign states, but the dialog carried out in DC makes it very difficult for anyone to acknowledge this. Basically, I set out to avoid the old, tired normative analysis.

What were your best and worst blogging experiences so far?

The most fun I’ve had so far is writing direct responses to articles that appear in the press. Doing this, I’ve managed to gain the attention of other bloggers and journalists, which has produced some stimulating private email exchanges and led InoSMI to translate a few of my posts (three, so far) into Russian.

The worst thing about blogging is an inverse of one of its best aspects: I’m regularly reminded how many talented, bright people there are out there with my exact specialty, who are regularly producing fascinating original work, and living abroad in Moscow, which I think of as a sort of bittersweet adventure.

What are the best blogs about Russia and the Eurasian space? What are the worst?

Some of my favorite Russia blogs (in no particular order): Julia Ioffe’s Moscow Diaries, Mark Adomanis’ On Russia, Sean’s Russia Blog, poemless (RIP — just kidding), this blog — Sublime Oblivion, The Russia Monitor, and Scraps of Moscow. I’ve recently started following Democratist, Dividing My Time, The Kremlin Stooge, and Neeka’s Backlog (which posts the loveliest photographs of Eastern Europe). In Russian, Maxim Kononenko at Idiot.fm and Oleg Kashin’s LiveJournal provide regular amusement. Evgeny Gontmakher, Medvedev’s “man on the outside,” has some amusing op-eds on his ‘blog’ at Ekho Moskvy. For military affairs, I regularly turn to the following three blogs: Russian Defense Policy, Russian Military Reform (Dmitry Gorenburg), and Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces (Pavel Podvig).

The Russia blogs with which I torture myself by reading are some of the following: the LJ blogs of Vladimir Milov, Vasily Yakemenko, and Andrey Illarionov. Catherine Fitzpatrick’s Minding Russia reliably produces some of the longest, most rambling posts you’ll find online. Oleg Kozlovsky’s blogs (WordPress for English and LJ for Russian) are both as boring as they are terrible. Since Oleg decided to integrate his Tweets with his LJ account, there has been five times as much garbage. Ilya Yashin’s LJ blog, modestly titled in Spanish “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” (A People United Will Never Be Defeated), is full of the same D-list self-promotion, but he sometimes includes photography and multimedia that makes reading his PR slightly more fun. (Also, he volunteered sordid details about an alleged threesome sex scandal that never got any corroboration beyond his own ranting. So, it can be entertaining on occasion, without a doubt.) And finally, Vladimir Kara-Murza’s blog, Spotlight on Russia, is another publication I love to hate for its unwavering commitment to recycling the most vapid, useless tropes about the ills of Russia.

I don’t even bother reading La Russophobe, which seems to just scrape the bottom of the Window on Eurasia barrel — another blog I skim but lack the stomach to honestly read. I think LR is too much opinion without enough style. Mark Adomanis (On Russia) and Mark Chapman (The Kremlin Stooge) are also very opionated and often openly insulting, but I’m able to enjoy their stuff mainly because (a) I don’t find their opinions to be so crazy (sorry, what can I say — I love to affirm my biases), and (b) their writing is immensely better.

What is your favourite place in Russia? Is there anywhere you haven’t been yet, but would love to visit?

I haven’t traveled Russia nearly enough. The farthest east I’ve been was a brief visit to Kazan’, which I thought was fascinating and beautiful. The local Kremlin there, which hosts both an Orthodox church and a mosque, has a marvelous statue out front dedicated to the world’s proletariat. Though I’m not a Marxist, the monument is awesome. Imagine Atlas breaking Ghostrider’s fire-chain in slow motion, and perhaps then you’ll understand how cool this thing is. Hell, just look at it here.

I’d love to see just about anywhere else in Russia I haven’t already been, which is most places.

If you could recommend one book about Russia, what would it be?

I wouldn’t trouble anyone with a whole book. To understand Russia’s transitional conundrum, one should begin by reading Yuri Slezkine’s 1994 article “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism“.

Do you think the average Russian lives better today than in 1988? 1980? 2000? Are they richer, freer or happier than before?

My impressions from talking to Russians is that life is better now that it’s been before. It’s still pretty lousy for most people, though. (I don’t think Russia is alone in this.) Whatever the benefits of modern living, Soviet nostalgia (for geopolitical status, for scientific respect, for athletic greatness, etc.) is also a patently real political force. Material realities are important, but it’s public perceptions that ultimately make the world.

How would you classify Russia’s political system? Is it a liberal democracy, an authoritarian regime, or a hybrid crossroads? Which current or historical political economies does it most resemble, if any?

Every polity is at a crossroads all the time. Every society in every nation in history is also a hybrid of various trends and persuasions. Russian politicians tend to have a more statist leaning in their way of conducting affairs, but this isn’t to say Western officials aren’t entangled in comparable webs of intervention, assistance, and power brokering. I honestly find very little to be gained by pursuing any classifications like those you suggest. If we call Russia ‘authoritarian,’ there are a thousand examples of information freedom and public debate to debunk this label. On the other hand, there are countless instances of repression to suggest that the Kremlin is indeed an authoritarian menace. Take your pick, but please leave me out of this errand.

On balance, do you think Putinism was good or bad for Russia? (Try not to sit on the fence here).

First of all, I don’t like the term “Putinism.” I think it gives too much ideological credit to the Putin administration, which has never bothered much with a real intellectual architecture for either the Power Vertical or United Russia. (Sorry, Surkov, but I’m just not seeing the big picture when you tell the Nashi kids to ‘innovate’ the way to tomorrowland.) Putin consolidated power during a time of political and economic anarchy. Was that a good thing? Of course it was. Russians were deeply unhappy with Boris Yeltsin’s second term (which they were scared into granting thanks to the a spectacular PR scheme by the oligarchs), and Putin brought more than just stability to the country — he managed a period of genuine prosperity that, at the very least, benefited enough of the country’s elites that they ceased open, internecine warfare.

The new focus on modernization and innovation under Dmitri Medvedev, whom I believe to be a political ally and proponent of “Putinism,” is just the next phase of a process begun ten years ago. Perhaps it’s thanks to Putin’s flexible non-ideology, but I believe that he’s capable of adapting tactics to the needs of the moment. If his financial team is telling him that foreign investment is a must, it’s no shock that the Kremlin is now pursuing FDI with all its might.

It’s not all roses with the Putin years. In 2001, Russia was 79th in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. Last year it was tied for 146th. (Hint: higher is worse.) While we shouldn’t attach apocalyptic significance to the designation of a number by a single NGO, the general consensus is definitely that corruption has been on the rise. This is a serious problem — it’s the serious problem. An optimistic take might be that, as the Kremlin begins to crack down on bribes and dodgy deals, the wrongdoers are trying to exact maximum rents as long-term insurance.

Or maybe Putin’s own web of rent distribution is the backbone of the ‘legal nihilism’ behind Russia’s Africa-level corruption. If that’s the case, then perhaps that way of doing business is no longer optimal. Recent overtures from Medvedev (presumably acting in agreement with Putin) suggest that the authorities are, at the very least, considering new priorities. It’s Russian politics in action.

If you could advise the Russian government to do one thing it isn’t already doing, what would it be?

Harassing the liberal opposition by denying them rally sites with fake counterprotests (for example, blood drives, and so on) seems to me to be a completely pointless exercise. It’s exactly this negative publicity that the opposition needs to survive, and the authorities continue to feed them this sustanance. Putin’s response, delivered to Shevchuk at the infamous luncheon exchange, was that these decisions aren’t up to him, but lie with local officials. Very well, Vladimir Vladimirovich, but why the hell don’t you get off your ass and exercise a little of that characteristic paternalism to steer your ship to calmer shores? I can only guess that the Kremlin is either unconcerned or desperately afraid — either of which seems like a stupid mindset for the leaders of the Russian Federation.

Additionally, I don’t see the point in squashing mayoral elections in cities across Russia. A few opposition victories by the communists or the SRs in buttfucknowhere cities is desirable! When Kondrashov won the Irkutsk spot recently, I thought ‘Wonderful!’ A few more such incidents will not even dent United Russia’s juggernaut, and it both injects some alternative voices into national politics and serves as excellent PR for Moscow to use in the faces of people who moan about attacks on democracy. And then I heard about Kondrashov switching affiliations to register with the ruling party. And then it turned out that the regional duma was seeking to abolish mayoral elections altogether in favor of an opaque ‘city manager’ appointment system. Again, the Kremlin and the authorities demonstrate an entirely unnecessary panic about the threat of opposition parties. If I had Putin’s or Medvedev’s ear, I’d scream into it that they need to display a bit more confidence — even if it’s in their own puppet political theater.

HARD Talk with A Good Treaty

ANATOLY KARLIN: As I understand, you are not the biggest fan of the Russian liberal opposition. You believe their leaders kowtow to the West and couldn’t care less about the everyday concerns of ordinary Russians. But consider the case of a patriotic Russian who detests the corruption and proizvol (arbitrariness) of state institutions and genuinely wants to improve human rights – not just those of Khodorkovsky, but of prison inmates, conscripts, minorities, etc. What can she realistically do about it, apart from ranting about the return of neo-Soviet totalitarianism in front of foreign TV cameras?

A GOOD TREATY: People “do” all kinds of things. Thirty-six parents and teachers in Ulyanovsk went on a week-long group hunger strike to successfully protest the closure of several local schools. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a group of youths in the Far East, fed up with local law enforcement and inspired by a particularly trigger-happy version of nationalism, decided to arm itself and start attacking police officers. Some people make it their profession to work in the line of danger — people like Natalia Estemirova and Sergey Magnitsky. Others lead scholarly human rights organizations like Oleg Orlov of Memorial, dedicated to unearthing a Soviet past they believe is forgotten at Russia’s peril.

All of these people are patriots in their own heads, and who am I to disagree?

I don’t begrudge the liberal opposition for ranting hyperbolisms in front of foreign TV cameras. This is half the business of being in the Russian liberal opposition, after all: (a) they need to provoke/tempt the authorities into cracking down on their rallies, otherwise nobody would ever care, and (b) they need to attract the attention of the West — for financial aid, for international connections, and for status. The liberal literati are frequent visitors to the United States — even the younger, student-”employed’ members like Ilya Yashin (who recently concluded a cross-country tour of the U.S.) and Oleg Kozlovsky (who’s been Stateside for weeks and is currently attending some kind of not-at-all-propagandistic-sounding democracy workshop at Stanford University).

These boys are more than welcome to globetrot wherever they like, but I personally can’t help but see them as a bunch of spoiled brats, partying to their own celebrity and hopelessly out of touch with the needs of ordinary Russians. (I’ve made it a point on AGT to focus on their endless infighting in order to highlight how self-centered and oblivious they really are.)

ANATOLY KARLIN: You noted that Oleg Kozlovsky’s rush to disassociate Solidarnost’ from the gay rights movement, or ”radical LGBT activists” as he calls them, is remarkably similar to the Kremlin’s own arguments for dismissing the Russian liberal movement: neither minority enjoys much approval from ordinary Russians (see On “Minor & Non-Critical” Issues: Oleg Kozlovsky vs. Gay Rights). This is an inconsistency at best; a less charitable explanation is that many Russian liberals are themselves hypocrites and homophobes.

But consider this from another perspective – though claiming to be “a fan of free societies”, you insist the current Russian liberal movement is morally bankrupt and should moderate its anti-Kremlin rhetoric to be accepted by ordinary Russians. But if compromise is the key to political breakout, why should Russian liberals embrace the LGBT movement, an act that is sure to “alienate the vast majority of the population”, as Kozlovsky says, but improve neither rights of assembly nor LGBT rights? Are you not guilty of the same double standards as both Kozlovsky and the Kremlin?

A GOOD TREATY: The leaders of the liberal opposition may be a band of egotistical creeps, but I don’t think the principles of the movement itself are necessarily bankrupt. Like with the communists, there’s an unhealthy degree of backward-looking thinking, in their case consumed primarily with nostalgia for and white-washing of the ‘troubled 1990s.’

I don’t think the opposition needs to “moderate its anti-Kremlin rhetoric.” Plenty of Russians are more than responsive to criticisms aimed at the authorities, and liberals from Eduard Limonov to Liudmila Alexeeva could remain prolific dissidents without abandoning their principles. Remember that even at 70% approval ratings, almost one-third of all Russians still disapproves of the political status quo.

What liberals would benefit from is a reappraisal of their goals. Over the last few years, they’ve moved from one fad to another. ‘Other Russia’ to ‘Solidarity.’ ‘Marchy nesoglasnikh’ to ‘Days of Rage.’ The newest campaign, ‘Strategy-31,’ is catchy, but it likely maxed out its publicity potential with the blowup at the end of May. (We’ll see if the next one in three days proves me wrong.) As Vladimir Milov pointed out in a radio debate with Ilya Yashin, Solidarity and its various rally projects have peaked. More people just aren’t coming anymore (in fact, many seem to be leaving, he claims).

This, I think, has more to do with the focus (or lack thereof) of the professional liberal protesters. Everywhere they look for concrete platform ideas, they’re terrified of casting the net too narrowly. Hence, they mustn’t support the gays for fear of alienating the masses. Certain environmental causes are taken up (such as the movement to protect Lake Baikal), but it’s usually in response to local initiatives elsewhere, and it’s after the real hubbub has ended. What Moscow’s protesting “elites” typically trumpet is an unattractive medley of ad hominem attacks on national figures. So it’s “Putin v ostavku” or “Luzhkov v tiur’mu” — the Russian equivalent of Bush-era peacenik demonstrators demanding the president’s impeachment or today’s Tea Party comparing Obama’s healthcare plan to National Socialism.

For the individuals involved in this movement, I’ve no doubt that they think they’re speaking ‘truth to power.’ On a superficial level, it’s certainly a pretty daring person who delights in taunting Russian OMON troops, essentially begging them for a beating and an arrest. But it’s that photogenic rush that seems to fool these folks into believing that they’re soldiers on the 21st century front against totalitarianism. When I met Oleg Kozlovsky earlier this year, he was asked if people feared for their jobs when attending rallies. His answer? Nope. Nobody gets fired for coming to these circuses. Come one, come all, to the political pageant.

If people like Yashin and Kozlovsky (and Milov and, I’m sure, nearly all the high profile lib leadership) want to ignore the gay rights movement for fear of endangering their popular appeal, I wonder why they can’t apply that same political sense to the rest of their activism. Either they are purists proudly pontificating from the periphery, or they’re cutthroat and calculating, and presumably seeking a way to speak to the interests and tastes of society at large. Right now, they seem to be occupying a sort of idiot’s limbo, where just about everyone has a reason to dislike them. And — what a shock — most Russians do.

ANATOLY KARLIN: When the Feds rolled up the “extremely undangerous” Russian spy ring, you argued that they managed to “jeopardize” an important relationship with the world’s second nuclear superpower. But STRATFOR would argue that you missed the point (see Russian Spies and Strategic Intelligence). Though Boris and Natasha failed to steal anything important, that wasn’t their goal to begin with! The traditional modus operandi of Russia’s intelligence services is to recruit young, promising Americans with potential careers in organizations like Lockheed Martin or the CIA (think Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames). Unless you want foreign moles infiltrating the Homeland’s national security agencies and military-industrial complex, why would you criticize the FBI for doing its job?

A GOOD TREATY: It’s funny that you mention Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames as examples of people at risk of being ‘turned’ but Russian secret agents, as both these men initiated their work as spies by themselves. Hanssen and Ames each lived beyond their means, and apparently approached Russian embassy personnel to sell U.S. state secrets in order to cover their debts and subsidize the high life. No unregistered foreign employees were required to flip these Americans, whose volunteered treachery led in turn to the deaths of Soviet and Russian traitors working for us. If Anna Chapman or anyone from her team of ‘Illegals’ was in a position to ‘flip’ an important American source, it would have marked a departure from the history of U.S. sellouts, who typically defect of their own accord to registered Russian officials.

ANATOLY KARLIN: You describe yourself as a foreign policy realist and admire Otto von Bismarck for his political acumen. But what if American geopolitical imperatives and “a good treaty with Russia” are incompatible? Let me expound. The foundations of geopolitics are Mackinder’s Heartland Theory and Mahan’s Influence of Sea Power upon History. According to this view of the world, the Russian Empire seeks hegemony over the Eurasian Heartland; in direct opposition, the United States tries to prevent its emergence through geopolitical balancing, economic constriction and amphibious interventions (in what Aleksandr Dugin calls the “Anaconda Strategy”). These geopolitical dynamics colored the Cold War and are once again coming into play: even as Russia reasserts its influence over the post-Soviet world, the US is preparing to withdraw from Iraq and is building forward bases in the Balkans and expanding defense ties with Poland.

Two questions follow from the above. First, one of America’s great strengths is the abiding attraction of its purported democratic model. Why then isn’t then the US export its “freedom” to check Russian expansionism, and if possible undermine the Kremlin itself? (After all, if guys like Kasparov or Khodorkovsky come to power, they can be expected to participate in the “international community” / serve Western interests). Second, as a realist, why would you disagree with Mearsheimer’s argument for a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent?

A GOOD TREATY: The U.S. is withdrawing from Iraq … and doubling-down in Afghanistan. Being overstretched and unable to seriously deliver on open-ended defense pacts with Eastern European states, the White House’s rhetoric about missile defense and security investments along Russia’s western periphery is worrying, to say the least. The decision to militarize what could have functioned as a peaceful buffer zone between Russia and Europe seems to me to have been an extremely unwise decision by U.S. decision-makers. Even at the height of the Cold War, American buildup in Western Europe was met by (or in response to) Soviet maneuvers within the Warsaw Pact. It was certainly competition, but spheres of influence were generally agreed upon, and — even during the various uprisings that led to Soviet troops being deployed in 1953, 1956, and 1968 — the U.S. never threatened intervention, and any direct confrontation remained a nonfactor. In the 2008 Ossetian war, however, George W. Bush’s advisers apparently lobbied for an attack on the Roki Tunnel — an act of war that would have engaged American soldiers directly against Russian troops. That the U.S. has reached a stage where it even contemplates initiating military strikes against the Russian army indicates the frightening recklessness behind any worldview built upon a foundation of “America’s great strengths.”

Any conversation about realism is incompatible with a question that opens, “If guys like Kasparov or Khodorkovsky come to power.” That being said, Vladimir Milov compares Kasparov to the early Bolsheviks, indicating that he might not be the friendliest candidate for a job in America’s global utopia. As for Khodorkovsky, installing him in the Kremlin would theoretically only put in his hands yet more power to buy or bump off his enemies and competitors. Even in this scenario, there’s reason to assume the U.S. would not find its ideal Slavic partner.

In living memory, it seems Washington has really only been happy when it’s been free to call all the shots — i.e., under the administration of Boris Yeltsin. If that’s really true, American spooks should look not to the liberal elite (who likely would only use more power to fight amongst themselves), but to institutional fissures in the Russian state. Yeltsin was in large part such a swell pal because he was all too happy to sell off the kitchen sink, as long as it meant the Soviet cooking space was left without running water. “Take all the sovereignty you can swallow” he commanded initially. It was only later, after he consolidated his own authority and raked the USSR’s ashes into the garbage chute, that national determination transformed into an all-out war for territorial integrity.

A weak Russian state will be less assertive on the international level, but destabilizing Russia itself can and would pose devastating risks to the human beings actually living there or nearby. (Luckily for Uncle Sam, I guess, his primary constituents are well across the pond.)

Regarding a nuclear Ukraine: great idea, but they surrendered the last of their bombs in 1996. Moreover: not a great, but a lousy idea. Russia would never have bought the concept that an unaligned Ukrainian state could exist with or without atomic weapons. Aside from the crippled era of Boris Yeltsin, the Kremlin has never been comfortable with the premise that Ukraine exists outside its “privileged sphere.” The attraction of a buffer zone does not apply to Ukraine. If Washington had insisted on maintaining a nuclear Kiev, Moscow would have interpreted it as a direct existential threat. In other words, it would have been extremely destabilizing in an already topsy-turvy decade.

Back to the Future

Many Russia watchers don’t like to put their money where they mouth is. Though I’m sure you’re not the type, feel free to confirm it by making a few falsifiable predictions about Russia’s future. After a few years, we’ll see if you were worth listening to.

Medvedev will be reelected in 2012. Putin will continue on as Prime Minister. There will be some staff reshuffling, but nothing will really change. By 2012, the Russian economy should be doing much better. (I expect the same to be true in the U.S., where Obama will likely ride an ‘It’s the Economy, Stupid’ mantra to a second term.)

The 2014 Sochi Olympic Games will not produce any major international embarrassments for Russia. Investigative reporters will have no trouble turning up horror stories about the waste that went into the project and the poverty it ignored alleviating in the surrounding areas, but I don’t expect any Dagestani terrorist attacks or roof collapses to indict the Kremlin for lousy management. As for Russia’s medal count: better than it was in Canada, but still low enough to trigger another slew of articles about the collapse of Soviet sports training.

Sooner or later, Alexei Kudrin will be ousted from his position in the Ministry of Finance. This guy’s name is attached to too many revenue-saving, unpopular budgetary measures for him not become a political liability eventually. I don’t expect him to go the route of Andrei Illarionov, however. He’ll be honorably discharged and put to use in some less public capacity.

The Solidarity Movement will fizzle out within the next few years, to be replaced by the next ‘it’ conglomeration of the very same individuals. Maybe they’ll call it the ‘March of the Raging 31 Dissidents.”

What are you plans for A Good Treaty?

I intend to simply keep posting 1-2 pieces every week on topics of my choosing. I like to alternate between big-headlines-grabbers (like the Russian spy ring) and stuff that requires me to be a bit more inventive and take time to research (like previous posts on Russian defamation law, the recent FSB law, the ‘Clean Water’ program, and so on). Unfortunately, based on the WordPress statistics to which I have access, it’s these latter posts that generate substantially fewer readers. I can’t blame the interwebs for sending me less traffic when I’m not writing about hot topics, but it is a little disappointing to know that some of the stuff that takes to most work to write is also the least popular.

The biggest thing I’ve started doing in connection with the blog recently is actively using Twitter. I include a snapshot stream of my tweets in the lefthand column on the blog, but I hope users will actually subscribe to my feed on Twitter itself, as this allows me to better track my followers, and allows for opportunities to interact with readers/users — which is something I love about the service.

There is a possible Russia blogging collaboration project in the works with Mark Adomanis, but I really can’t say anymore because I don’t know anything more than that. He contacted me recently about the idea, and we tentatively agreed to make something happen. As I said above, Mark is a very talented writer, and I’m pretty excited about the idea of mooching shamelessly off his celebrity. Thanks, Marco!

And thank you, A Good Treaty, for an excellent interview!

If you wish me to interview you or another Russia watcher, feel free to contact me.

costs more than just a normal road...

The Russian magazine Esquire came up with some pretty shocking figures: it would be cheaper to pave one 48km road for the Sochi Olympics with elite beluga caviar than asphalt. The total cost would come in at a cool 227 billion rubles, or $160 million per kilometer – five times higher than what it costs to build an equivalent stretch of Autobahn! (It’s also 2/3 of what Russia spent on all road construction in 2009). But even under the most charitable assumptions, that the Sochi road will be built to the highest traction and environmental standards, doesn’t this mean that at least 80% of the Sochi road funds are being stolen?

Not really. The only problem with looking at Russia through this failed state prism, without bothering to corroborate sources, is that in no sense can the Adler-Krasnaya Polyana route be described as just a “roadway”. Intended to be completed within 3 years in an area with a poorly developed infrastructure, this so-called “road” also includes a high-speed railway, more than 50 bridges, and 27km of tunnels over mountainous, ecologically-fragile terrain!

[This thing sure looks like a red slope into red budgets!]

So once we establish the elementary fact that this is more than just a road, things begin to make a lot more sense. True, the $8bn figure is almost certainly significantly inflated by the corruption, kickbacks and monopoly price distortions typical of the Russian construction industry. However, this is not the blatant money-laundering operation implied by media outlets like The Other Russia when they imply that these huge numbers are only being used to build one single, 48km road.

this buys more than a road...

I’ll end this short post by making three observations. First, corruption is bad enough in Russia without exaggerating it into Congo-like dimensions, where $1bn of gold exports bring in just $37k for the state treasury! (Closer to the Homeland, Massachusetts managed to spend $15bn, rising to $22bn with interest payments, on a few kilometers of shoddily-constructed tunnels). Now this isn’t to play a whataboutist game or imply that the US is more corrupt than Russia (it quite simply isn’t). But some degree of comparative perspective is certainly needed.

Second, the real issue at hand is the social justice of spending so many state funds on an elite ski resort that only the upper quartile of Russians and foreigners can enjoy. On the one hand, the national prestige of holding an Olympics is at stake. On the other hand, it diverts money – along with white elephants like the Far Eastern bridge to nowhere – from other priorities such as the general national infrastructure. This should be the real locus of the debate.

H/t @ the commentators on this post by Julia Ioffe for some links and ideas.

There are many reasons to dismiss these arguments, as I will try to show in this post. First, the very inventor of the BRICs concept, Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs (who has probably thought more about it than anyone else) dismisses the argument that Russia is ineligible on the basis that is was the only country amongst them to show (highly) negative growth during the economic crisis as “rubbish”. He goes on to add that “the only reason that Russia was hurt so badly was unlike the others, it borrowed heavily on the international capital markets and, of course, it is dependent on the price of oil.” ** Of course, the Russian economy’s dependence on Western intermediation for its credit is a structural weakness, and one that was exposed in late 2008. But potential faultlines like this are hardly unique amongst the BRICs – its most promising member, China, critically depends on exports for continued growth***, and its banks are saddled with bad debts.

Second, many of these arguments from demography (“dying Russia”), infrastructure (“crumbling Russia”), and institutions (“Zaire with permafrost”) are both 1) exaggerated in severity and 2) exaggerated in their influence on economic development.

Take Russia’s plummeting population… except that it hasn’t been plummeting or even falling since 2009! (It is now stagnant). True, Russia is going to see a substantial fall in its labor pool – according to the Rosstat medium scenario, from 62% of the total population now to a truly apocalyptic 55% by 2030****. (Yes, that was sarcasm). And though its population will age substantially in the next few decades, there probably won’t be any problems with paying pensions thanks to its resource wealth. Basically, Russia’s demography is neither as bad as it is usually portrayed in the Western media, nor will it negatively impact on its future economic development in any significant way.

Now what about Russia’s crumbling infrastructure? Though Russia having no roads, only directions may be cliché*****, it does undoubtedly have an element of truth. But look at this from another perspective. Russia might have plenty of crumbling concrete and rusting iron carcasses, interspersed with the occasional modern highway or recently-built gleaming showpiece – but does it really, really need better infrastructure, or are its resources better spent elsewhere? At least unlike India, or even Brazil or China, Russia has a complete industrial infrastructure. Its “Khrushchevki” prefabricated concrete tower blocs and disused railway stocks may give it a decrepit, even post-apocalyptic air, but the equivalent scene in India or China may well consist of a village of peasant huts with dirt paths meandering through it! In other words, Russia needs new infrastructure relatively less than the other BRICs (yet even so, Merrill Lynch predicted it would spend more in the next three years than either India or Brazil, despite its smaller population)!

Finally, yes – Russian institutions are corrupt and its state is illiberal and (semi-)authoritarian, though arguably it is democratic****** (of course the degree to which this is the case can be subject to endless debate). However, the evidence indicates that institutions have historically had relatively little impact on economic growth or “convergence”. A multi-author NBER study in 2004 on Do Institutions Cause Growth? was summarized thus:

We revisit the debate over whether political institutions cause economic growth, or whether, alternatively, growth and human capital accumulation lead to institutional improvement. We find that most indicators of institutional quality used to establish the proposition that institutions cause growth are constructed to be conceptually unsuitable for that purpose. We also find that some of the instrumental variable techniques used in the literature are flawed. Basic OLS results, as well as a variety of additional evidence, suggest that a) human capital is a more basic source of growth than are the institutions, b) poor countries get out of poverty through good policies, often pursued by dictators, and c) subsequently improve their political institutions.

Russia seems to fit the above model reasonably well. It has high human capital – far better than China or Brazil, let alone India. As I wrote earlier, “Around 70% of Russians go into higher education, compared with just 20-25% of Brazilians or Chinese… in the 2006 PISA science assessment, only 15.2% of Brazilians possessed skills beyond those needed for purely linear problem-solving, compared with 47.6% of Russian and 51.3% of American students”. Already resembling a developed country in human capital and having pursued reasonably effective economic policies under Putin, Russia may now slowly be moving towards surmounting that last institutional hurdle, with Medvedev now taking aim at the MVD (police) and bureaucracy.

Finally, it would be well to point out one area in which Russia has a decisive advantage over the other BRICs – it is already a much more developed economy and society. As of 2009, and despite the economic crisis, Russia’s real GDP per capita was 14,900$, far higher than Brazil’s 10,500$, China’s 6,600$, and India’s 2,900$ (not to mention that Russia’s Gini index of wealth inequality, at 41, is lower than both China’s 47 and Brazil’s 57). Really, the most convincing reason to leave Russia out of the BRICs is not that it doesn’t belong there, but that it won’t grow as fast as the others simply because it is already substantially richer than them and as such no longer has as much space to catch up! (And hence would not be as attractive to investors)…

That said, Russia in the next decade will probably grow relatively fast nonetheless – not only because it is a well-educated nation with substantial room left for “catch up” growth to developed world levels, but because of a very favorable external environment. First, the (probable) peaking of oil production and China’s ravenous growth******* means that oil and resource prices will remain high, bringing in the hard currencies that would help Russia buttress its fiscal position and buy the technologies it needs to modernize itself from the West.

Second, in a dramatic turnaround from 1998, Russia today is now in a much stronger long-term fiscal position than practically any Western developed country. The article Rerating Russia by Ben Aris is worth quoting in extenso:

Russia’s credit rating is way too low, as it boasts some of the strongest fundamentals in the world, but it’s still tarred by its increasingly irrelevant “emerging market” moniker… The world has been turned upside down by the global financial crisis. Nowhere is this clearer than in [Greece's and Russia's] bond offerings. While Greece is sagging under a heavy public debt burden, Russia not only has almost no debt to speak off (Capital Economics predicts 9.5% of GDP by the end of this year), but also has well over $400bn in hard currency reserves. That’s five times more than either the US or UK, making it the third-richest country in the world in terms of cash. …

Russia is enjoying a mirror image of the problems its more developed peers are facing up to. For example, the UK is one of the most indebted countries in Europe now after it borrowed a massive €257bn last year, ratcheting up its leverage to borrow about €2.80 for every €1 that the Bank of England is holding in its vaults as a reserve. The US is in similar dire straits.

… Currently, Russian sovereign debt has a ‘BBB’ rating, which is only two notches above junk bond status. At the same time the US and UK have (so far) kept their ‘AAA’ ratings despite their worsening finances. Most economists are predicting Europe’s external debt to rise from 100% of GDP to 130% over the next five years, while that of Russia is expected to continue falling. Indeed, analysts say that the ratings of developed countries’ have disconnected with reality, while countries like Russia are being penalised. “On the basis of our model, the [best possible] ‘AAA’ rating for the US and the United Kingdom cannot be explained, as these two countries are rated two to three rating notches better than countries with comparable fundamental data,” Ingo Jungwirth, an analyst with Raiffeisen International, wrote in a study in March.

His study found that based solely on the country’s finances, both the US and UK should be downgraded three notches to a ‘AA’. However, if the ratings agency actually went through with a downgrade, the cost of borrowing to both countries would spike and spark a financial global crisis, which would probably wreck the global economy for decades. Jungwirth suggests that these two countries earn a “bonus” for being too big to fail.

On the flip side, Russia is underrated given the strength of its financial position. Consider that on the day Iceland defaulted on its debt at the start of this crisis, it enjoyed higher ratings than Russia. Today Russia’s ‘Baa1′ rating from Moody’s Investors Service is still the same as bailout-dependent Iceland’s. Fitch Ratings and Standard & Poor’s currently class Russian debt as ‘BBB’ – even lower than Moody’s. …

There are already some signs that investors are cottoning on to the strength of the Russian bond offering. After US investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, the spreads on UK credit defaults swaps (CDS) … have soared by 281 basis points (bps). At the same time, Russia’s CDS have actually contracted by 17 bps over the same period, making it one of the few countries in the world deemed by investors to be a safer place to invest than it was before the start of the crisis. …

The US, Japan, and most of Europe have reached their limits to growth. Now faced with unsustainable budget deficits, ballooning debts, and intense (BRIC-centered) competition for remaining high net energy resources, the long era of Western hegemony is now coming to an end. It is thus with some skepticism and bemusement that I view the smug commentary in the Western media on the Russian Foreign Ministry leak published at Russian Newsweek********, which they claim show Moscow’s “planning to reorient its foreign policy in a more pragmatic and pro-Western direction”, in apparent acknowledgement of its failed policies of dirigisme within and confrontation without.

In reality, the Kremlin’s détente-for-modernization leak is more likely to be an Aesopian telegram that conveys Russia’s satisfaction with what it has already achieved and of the new world order that is emerging. In the past decade, the Russian state has consolidated and reestablished a sphere of “privileged interests” across Eurasia, decisively purging Ukraine and Central Asia of Western influence. Meanwhile, with the United States facing severe fiscal stress and geopolitical challenges on other fronts in the Middle East and the Far East, the West now has neither strength nor will to push back against Russia beyond Visegrad, and is beginning to lose its unity and cohesion. Russia’s security dilemma is retreating, as a new geopolitical equilibrium crystallizes along the marches between the West and Eurasia.

Since good fences make good neighbors, this paves the way for better relations between Russia and some Western countries, in particular Germany, Italy, and France (in the Russian leak, Britain is conspicuous in its absence). Take the former. What interest does Germany really have in sending soldiers and paying taxes to perform a doomed “civilizing mission” in Afghanistan for the US, or in subsidizing Mediterranean profligacy while imposing stringent discipline on itself in return for their (aging and shrinking) markets? On the other hand, there is great potential for synergy between the German and Russian economies. The Teutonic industrialists have technologies and capital that Russia now needs to modernize its manufacturing and hi-tech industries, while the Russians have the energy and mineral resources that could keep German factories humming well into the age of scarcity industrialism. Back in October 2009, I suggested that this economic relation could be the basis for a new German-Russian alliance; now the New York Times has caught on.

The American age of dominance is waning and will soon come to an end and a new constellation of Powers will take its place. Far from being a shunned BRIC in a world run by the West, Russia will be one of the main poles in the new world of the Rest.

* See Nouriel Roubini, Anders Aslund or Julia Ioffe for the standard spiel.

** See “The R of the BRICs Remains Solid” part of this post.

*** Of course there are arguments that the magnitude of these problems are overstated.

**** The irony is that the more Russia’s (abnormally low) life expectancy and (now fairly average by European standards) fertility rates improve, the worse its dependency ratio will get in the decades ahead! Yet another demonstration of the stupidity of simple-minded extrapolation of population trends to future economic prospects.

***** In any case, in an age of peak oil, the wisdom of expanding road networks further is open to question. Russia would be better served by modernizing its railway system, on which it plans to spend 390bn $ by 2030.

****** On the basis that it fulfills democratic norms on paper although not in spirit, and in the sense that most Russians believe Russia is free and democratic (as was not the case during the Yeltsin period). Both the Polity IV political database and Economist Democracy Index perceive Russia as a kind of hybrid regime that is neither liberal democratic nor fully authoritarian.

******* This illustrates another important point – the BRICs are greater than the sum of their parts; they are more of an idea and a concept, than some kind of ranking in which countries can be kicked out of for (perceived) lack of performance. Strong Chinese and Indian growth, for example, help pull along nations like Russia or Brazil that are more heavily based in resource extraction.

******** See the full “О Программе эффективного использования на системной основе внешнеполитических факторов в целях долгосрочного развития Российской Федерации” here.

Putin. Not (quite) my God.

I’ve been accused of being a “Russophile cockroach”, an “amoral Putin lackey”, and overall bad guy. Guilty as charged! Yes, I do like Russia and don’t have much good to say about the Western media’s coverage of it. Yes, I don’t give much of damn for the moralistic posturing that any vapid idiot Kremlinologist can easily excel in. And yes, I do have a positive opinion of Vladimir Putin (as do 75%+ of Russians). Now granted, part of this probably has something to do with the huge amounts of money his FSB minions kindly slip under my door for glorifying their Tsarist godfather on the Internet in my spare time. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that I set my alarm clock to VVP’s speeches, drink prodigal amounts of Putinka for breakfast, and bow before his icon at the Altar of Neo-Stalinism in my basement before logging onto my workstation to fulfill my job description as ein strammer Putin-soldat. In reality, my positive view of Putin is moderate and hedged.

Don’t believe my word as “the dishonest, progangadizing (very, very) little maggot” that I really am? Below I present five major shortcomings of the Putin Presidency.

What Putin did wrong

1. Waiting until 2006, or too little too late.

Since 2006, Russia embarked on a range of policies designed to check its demographic decline, reduce poverty, and recover its status as a Great Power. The main examples would be the National Priority Projects; a revamped industrial policy; health promotion; pro-natality, AIDS containment and anti-alcohol measures; military modernization; and incubation of hi-tech industries such as nanotechnology. Many of these are already bearing fruit – quite literally on the demographic front, where the total fertility rate rose to 1.56 children per woman by 2009, from 1.1-1.3 before 2006. In conjunction with falling mortality rates, this resulted in Russia experiencing its first year of population growth in 2009 since 1994. But why did Putin take so long to start addressing all these issues?

Though there are several possible explanations, I think the most accurate is that at the time Putin was simply too preoccupied with stabilizing the Russian shell of the collapsed Soviet empire. Each functioning state rests on its monopolization of legitimate violence, of tax collection, and of the issuing of money. All three monopolies were under grave threat by the late 1990′s. Homicide rates were sky-high, organized crime infiltrated state structures, and Chechen bandits raided Russia proper. The state was too weak to collect taxes from the oligarchs, producing chronic budget deficits that culminated in the 1998 default. Inflation raged unchecked, most transactions were in dollars or in kind, and many analysts were starting to describe Russia as a failed state. Therefore it cannot be surprising that Putin in his first term devoted most of his attention towards containing and mitigating these mortal threats to the Russian state. The invasion of Chechnya, the political subjugation of the oligarchs, the strengthening of the “power vertical” – all these were intended to restore some modicum of state control over the Russian Federation.

Yet as the political struggle went on at the top, the “real Russia” remained largely stagnant. With the inflow of ethnic Russians from the Near Abroad largely exhausted, demographic decline accelerated in the 2000-2005 period. In contrast to the broad-based growth after 2005/2006, in the early Putin years manufacturing remained depressed, while more than a third of economic growth accrued to the recovery in oil extraction. Little new infrastructure was built. The rate of military procurement dropped even below the miserly levels of the Yeltsin era. Thanks to the Putin government’s myopic negligence or administrative inability, Russia’s manifold, deepgrained socio-economic problems only began to be seriously addressed within the past few years.

Strike 1 – Contrary to most fans and critics alike, Putin didn’t do too much. He did too little, and too late. Under the first few years of his watch, Russia lost historical time just as it did under Yeltsin. On many socio-economic indicators, the RF in 2010 has only caught up to what the RSFSR achieved back in 1990.

2. Red tape and corruption, or the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of an expanding bureaucracy.

Corruption remains “public enemy number one”, according to President Medvedev. This can be confirmed by any number of horrific anecdotes: the absurdly inflated Moscow housing market,  bureaucrats owning property worth hundreds of their yearly salaries, entrepreneurs losing their businesses to well-connected thugs. Apart from a few cosmetic house-cleaning campaigns under the Putin President, the state’s efforts to control this scourge have been decidedly lack-luster, and Russia continues to be perceived as one of the most corrupt nations on Earth.

[Sources: Transparency International's "Corruption Perceptions Index"; Transparency International's "Global Corruption Barometer", answers to the question, "In the past 12 months, have you or anyone in your household paid a bribe in any form?" (% saying "yes"); World Bank's "Worldwide Governance Indicators" (Control of Corruption), country percentile].

This corruption is directly related to the arbitrary power of Russia’s bureaucracy, and the labyrinth of regulations that “justify” its existence. Love them or hate them – and yes, most Russians hate them – bureaucrats are indispensable for running a modern state. However, in Russia bureacrats are neither accountable unlike in most developed nations nor held under close scrutiny unlike in the USSR or today’s China. Furthermore, their numbers are well in excess of necessity. In contrast to a few post-Soviet nations like Estonia and Georgia which fired many of their bureaucrats, the Russian bureaucracy grew rapidly under Putin.

[Source: Rosstat].

The extractions of rent-seeking bureaucrats stunt the development of small and medium businesses. Furthermore, corruption indirectly kills people (e.g. grocery pharmaceuticals are expensive and unreliable) and fosters a destructive social mentality in which anything and everything is considered exchangeable for money and the privileged and connected can act with impunity.

As the man at the top of the pyramid, Putin was responsible for perpetuating this system during his Presidency. Sensational rumors of foreign villas and multi-billion dollar offshore accounts to the contrary, there is no evidence that Putin is personally corrupt*. However, controlling corruption within one’s circle and further down is extremely hard; no Russian ruler, except the most steely and despotic, has ever managed to rein in his bureaucrats. Now you could go down the neo-Stalinist route, but executing corrupt bureaucrats is now politically incorrect in most places outside China. Perhaps Putin should have simply axed this Gordian knot, like Saakashvili in Georgia**? That might have worked, – no regulation, no bureaucrat, no problem. But something stayed his hand. Maybe he feared chaos, since the bureaucracy is one the forces gluing a nation together. Maybe they were considered necessary to reconsolidate the state and rebuild the power vertical. I don’t know.

Maybe Putin shouldn’t have suppressed Russia’s civil society and media outlets if he was serious about checking corruption? But this is a false narrative. It is not the federal government or Putin, but unreformed institutions such as the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), the FSB, the Prosecutor-General, etc, that pose the greatest hazards to Russia’s nascent civil society. It is not VVP who runs around killing and harassing journalists, but the “stationary bandits” in government and/or business taking advantage of Russia’s culture of impunity. The ultimate proof of the pudding is Ukraine – despite its pluralistic politics and journalistic freedoms after the Orange Revolution, corruption there remains at least as bad as in semi-authoritarian Russia***. No matter the personal integrity or ability of Russia’s (or Ukraine’s leaders), the entire post-Soviet state system remains unacceptably opaque and unaccountable.

Strike 2 – Putin could have mitigated Russia’s corruption and culture of impunity by: 1) stripping away the reams of red tape that create opportunities for rent-seeking, 2) decimating the ranks of the bloated bureaucracy, traffic police, etc, or 3) increasing the penalties for, or the “costs” of, corruption. In reality, there was some improvement in 1) and 3), and massive backtracking on 2). It is only under Medvedev that government and citizenry are beginning to show signs of taking corruption more seriously.

3. Inequality, or oiligarchs & their little adults.

Russians are not Americans. Though most accept the capitalist system, a majority of Russians believe the state has a duty to narrow down inequality between rich and poor and assure everyone a decent standard of living. Opinion polls indicate that around 63% of Russians are essentially “statists”, while only 25% are economic “liberals” and an insignificant 4% are small-government libertarians. Thouh there has been impressive progress on lifting all boats in the past decade – poverty rates were slashed, consumer goods became much more affordable – the Putin regime also presided over an era of slowly rising inequality****. This does not sit well with many Russians, especially the elderly who put great stock in egalitarian values.

[Source: Rosstat].

It is no great exaggeration to say that Russia’s government is by the rich and for the rich. Though perhaps at first necessary as the most reliable way for a broken state to combat tax evasion, the 13% flat tax on incomes now perpetuates inequalities. A much bigger burden falls on productive companies in the form of (highly regressive) social security contributions, which are set to rise from 26% to 34% of the first 400,000 rubles of income this year to help correct the budget deficit. However, Putin had no problems with reducing taxes for oil companies, so that they could either extract and sell off Russia’s oil the faster, or pocket the extra change.

Worst of all are the effects on social cohesion. All Russian oligarchs earned their wealth through their connections with the state – there is not a single Sergei Brin or Bill Gates amongst them. The inheritance tax was abolished in 2006, and now more than a hundred Russian children, or “little adults“, are set to acquire billions without earning a single ruble. Sure, these “new Russians” get to experience the shallow thrills of conspicuous consumption, and take power in their sleazy connections with state structures to run over ordinary Russians with impunity (sometimes literally). The price Russia pays for tolerating these historyless elites is a perpetual bankruptcy of social capital, the cooperative spirit that welds a nation together. Amongst other things, this dearth of social capital manifests itself in society’s tolerance for petty corruption. After all, why should a simple traffic policeman, doctor, or other low-paid state worker refrain from taking bribes, when oligarchs make off with billions in cahoots with the state?

There has been no effort to check or reverse the growth of inequality under either Putin or Medvedev. Even as the Fair Russia opposition party calls for progressive taxation and a luxury tax, Roman Abramovich is indulging himself to his biggest yacht so far, armed with a missile defense system and laser shield.

Strike 3 – Putin presided over an increase in inequality, made all the more unholy by money’s marriage with socio-political privilege. Though neither the trend towards nor the magnitude of inequality is exceptional by global standards, it clashes with Russian popular sentiments and undermines social capital.

4. Economic mismanagement, or stationary bandits who don’t know or care about limits to growth.

First, the “Muscovite” rent-granting political economy over which Putin presided is both economically inefficient and socially unjust. Take the Russian oil industry, in which politically subservient oiligarchs are given free rein to manage their own companies. This combines the worst of both private and state ownership. Lacking security over their assets, the oiligarchs are loath to plow too much of their own money into maximizing long-term oil extraction and revenue. Far better to maximize short-term extraction by overexploiting their oil fields, pleasing the Tsar with generous rent payments, and to make off once these fields go into premature decline. In the meantime, astronomical profits are diverted into a few oiligarch hands instead of going to the Russian state. Now granted, Putin’s “purgatory”, run by clans of “stationary bandits”, might be an improvement over Yeltsin’s “hell” of asset-stripping “roving bandits”… but they are all still bandits nonetheless.

Yet when all is said and done, it is not entirely clear that Putin could have realistically done better on any of these issues. He inherited the “Muscovite system” from Yeltsin and can be credited with actually making it workable, in the sense that the oligarchs were forced into paying their taxes and Russia’s chronic budget deficits were finally eradicated. Reversing privatization and trying to create a Russian version of Statoil, the efficient state-owned Norwegian energy company, was entirely unrealistic given the institutional rot of the Russian state. The other extreme, a full-scale liberalization of the oil sector, would have probably been counter-productive because of that same weakness of the Russian state. For proof, look no further than how Khodorkovsky used YUKOS’ resource wealth to mount a direct political challenge to the Kremlin… would the Russian people really have been well served if their state had been hijacked by the Menatep bandits?

Second, even accounting for its being a cold, landlocked country with a lot of heavy industry, Russia remains very energy inefficient. There are serious uncertainties over its ability to meet future domestic and European gas demand, and its oil production will soon peak and go into decline. However, by world standards, Russia is supremely well-endowed with energy resources. Thus, it makes manifest sense to use the earnings from foreign hydrocarbons sales to aggressively implement energy efficiency measures and build a green energy infrastructure. The World Bank estimates that investing 320bn $ into energy efficiency could save Russian consumers 80bn $ and generate more than 100bn $ in extra export revenues annually. Putin prefers to go the much more expensive route of greatly expanding generating capacity, e.g. by building many nuclear power plants, while less glamorous but cheaper options like insulating housing, upgrading utilities, or reducing natural gas flaring are neglected. So yes, Russia’s policies on energy are short-termist and “cornucopian”, – but the very same could be said for almost any country one cares to name. Only a bare handful of nations, like Sweden or Germany, have made serious commitments to sustainable development (and none acknowledge the concept of Limits to Growth).

Third, the main reason Russia experienced such a deep recession during the 2009 global financial crisis was because its banks and corporations had become dependent on infusions of Western credit. Once this system throttled up in late 2008, emerging markets were the first to be cut off. Unfortunately, Russia under Putin’s watch had failed to develop the deep indigenous credit systems that enabled countries like Brazil or China to weather the storm in good shape, and it saw a massive GDP decline of 7.9% in 2009. But it’s not exactly clear how Russia could have prepared better. The main reason Russia’s financial system was starved of capital was because instead of reinvesting the proceeds from hydrocarbon sales into the economy, the government bought up foreign currency reserves in order to prevent an excessive ruble strengthening from short-circuiting the revival of Russia’s manufacturing base. Ironically, by trying to reduce its resource dependency, Russia actually increased its exposure to the Western financial system, whose weaknesses only became obvious with the benefit of hindsight. Nonetheless, despite the severity of the GDP drop in 2009, the Russian economy is now showing signs of mounting a vigorous recovery.

Finally, Putin should be given big props for protecting Kudrin – the main architect of Russia’s macroeconomic stability – from the attacks of the spendthrifts and siloviki in his circle. This did nothing to benefit him politically, but as a result Russia today is “one of the world’s most fiscally secure nations”, according to Liam Halligan, chief economist with Prosperity Capital Management.

Strike 4 – under Putin, Russia remained economically unproductive, socially unjust, energy inefficient, and acquired a dependence on Western credit. These problems are deep and are unlikely to go away without intelligent intervention by the state.

5. White elephants, or Siberian bridges to nowhere.

The Russian state has always liked “white elephant” solutions to complicated problems. Putin continued in this proud tradition. Perhaps the best example of this were Russia’s wild-eyed plans to construct six aircraft carriers during the giddy heights of its pre-crisis boom. Let’s look at the problems with this scheme:

1. The global hegemony of the United States rests on the power projection capabilities of its 11 aircraft carrier battle groups. Russia is a regional land power whose strategic interests do not extend far beyond its Near Abroad.
2. Russia’s economic base is seven times smaller than America’s.
3. Even the “structurally militarized” USSR never had much success with aircraft carriers. Russia’s military-industrial complex is now almost an order of magnitude smaller and no longer has access to the big drydocks in Ukraine.
4. Russia can’t even build a decent helicopter carrier, and eventually took the rational decision to order Mistrals from France.
5. The days of the aircraft carrier may well be numbered due to the development of cheap carrier-killing weapons systems.

This particular white elephant never was to be. But far too many are real enough, such as the bridge to nowhere near Vladivostok that will connect the Russian mainland to a small island populated by a few thousand residents, projected to cost more than 1bn $ and intended as a showpiece for the 2012 APEX summit. Meanwhile, the roads from the Urals to Vladivostok remain little more than dirt tracks.

Now admittedly, white elephants are minor nuisances relative to the first four problems. Their attractions are hardly unique to Russia, and it could even be argued that some, like the Sochi Olympics, are a net positive thanks to their impact on national morale. Nonetheless, I still think improving Russia’s energy efficiency or networking its clunky armed forces is somewhat more important than erecting suspension bridges in Siberia or dreaming about multiple carrier battle groups patrolling the Russian Arctic.

Strike 5 – Putin is sometimes too influenced by the traditions of Soviet gigantism to consider humbler, more cost-effective ways of solving problems.

What Putin did right

But what about that KGB spy’s ruthless suppression of freedom and democracy? False narrative. The majority of Russians approve of Putin and his system – as of 2008, some 75% of Russians felt that they either had “enough” or even “too much” freedom. Today’s Russians feel much happier and freer than in either the late Soviet Union or Yeltsin’s Russia.

But hasn’t Putin suppressed the free media and brainwashed Russians into worshipping him? Yet if that were the case, one would presumably expect most Putinistas to be old, sour-mouthed Stalinists, whereas in fact support for Putin (and disillusionment with the West) is highest amongst young, university-educated Muscovite men – the very segment of the Russian population that is most exposed to the West through the Internet and foreign travel! (Of course, to the Western chauvinist, this must mean that the Russian people are ignorant, nationalist sheeple… since nothing can be allowed to challenge their faith, there is little point in talking to them).

What about Putin’s hatred of the West? Again, false narrative. Putin the KGB operative is inseparable from the Putin who served under Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St.-Petersburg in the 1990′s, or the Putin who favored the “civiliki” clan (Surkov, Medvedev, “patriotic liberals”) over the FSB-connected “siloviki” in his choice of successor. But why then does Putin antagonize America by maintaining relations with freedom-haters like Ahmadinejad and Chavez? Newsflash! This is Realpolitik, practiced by all sane and sovereign nations. Bending over backwards to advance Washington’s national security interests is not part of Putin’s job description. Not can it reasonably be expected, due to US support for states hostile to Russia (e.g. Georgia) in its Near Abroad.

One of Putin’s greatest strengths is that he recognizes the immense harm Russia suffered from single-minded past pursuits of abstract ideals, and rejects mindless idolization of the West as surely as he rejects the old Marxist-Leninist dogmas. He is a national figure of post-ideological reconciliation, a leader who sees no paradox in defending the Soviet Union against politicized attempts to equate it with Nazi Germany while honoring Russians like the dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or the White general Anton Denikin.

Zhou Enlai may have been exaggerating when he said the impact of the French Revolution was “too early to tell”, but nonetheless, I think it is fair to say that we must wait at least a few decades before we have any hope of objectively determining Putin’s legacy. Based on the criticisms I’ve made in this post, some analysts would rush to dismiss Putin as an incompetent idiot or malicious enemy of the Russian people. After all, it doesn’t take much to pronounce judgment from the comforts of one’s armchair… Yet none of us have been in Putin’s boots. We didn’t experience his early struggles with the oligarchs, the contraints and frustrations he faced trying to rule Russia through an unwieldy and corrupt bureaucracy, the pyramid of cards he has to build and maintain to balance the warring Kremlin clans. I can do no better than quote a great speech by Theodore Roosevelt to illustrate this point:

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Putin’s critics, knowing neither victory nor defeat, are nothing more than the dust at the feet of that great man who continues struggling, striving, and spending himself as Russia’s humble servant.

* To the best of my knowledge, all these allegations of Putin’s 40bn $ of personal wealth originate from Stanislav Belkovsky, a professional purveyor of kompromat and creature of Sechin’s silovik clan.

** Georgia’s success at controlling corruption shouldn’t be exaggerated. In recent years, the Saakashvili regime acquired the habit of pressuring independent businesses to provide “voluntary contributions” in return for not bankrupting them under corruption prosecutions.

*** Russia’s corruption should be viewed in perspective. Is it a serious problem that reinforces privelege and blights the lives of many people? Certainly. Apocalyptic? Not at all. First, Russia is not excessively corrupt by the standards of most middle-income countries, and there is evidence that “everyday” corruption (as opposed to business corruption) fell under Putin’s watch. See here, here, and here. Second, corruption does not seriously affect Russia’s growth potential. Italy was systematically corrupt in the 1970′s-80′s (and still is), as exposed in the short-lived mani pulite investigatations of the early 1990′s. But that did not stop Italy from overtaking Britain’s GDP back in 1987 in the so-called “Il Sorpasso”. Likewise, Russia’s myriad strengths – the strong education system, energy wealth, and macroeconomic stability – means that its systematic corruption is unlikely to constitute an insurmountable barrier against its convergence to Western levels of development.

**** Russia’s levels of inequality shouldn’t be exaggerated, however. The Gini index of income inequality has been stable at around 40 since the early 1990′s, and is only high by European standards. (The US and China are at 45, most Latin American countries exceed 50).

Warre bringeth ruine, ruine bringeth poverty, poverty procureth peace, and peace in time increaseth riches, riches causeth statelinesse, statelinesse increaseth envie, envie in the end procureth deadly malice, mortall malice proclaimeth open warre and bataille, and from warre again as before is rehearsed.

Turchin, Peter – War and Peace and War (2006)
Category: history, cliodynamics, war; Rating: 4/5
Summary: Amazon reviews

Ibn Khaldun, Malthus, and Saint Matthew meet up for coffee

1) According to the Arab philosopher Ibn Khaldun, empires only form when a tribe, nation, or religious sect attains a high degree of asabiya, – the ability of a group’s members to cooperate with each other, to maintain their identity and discipline in the face of adversity, and to impose their beliefs, values, and control over other groups. Other similar expressions are social cohesion or “social capital”. As Ibn Khaldun wrote, “royal authority and dynastic power are attained only through a group and asabiya. This is because aggressive and defensive strength is obtained only through… mutual affection and willingness to fight and die for each other”. (To put this in context, this is similar to Lev Gumilev’s theories of “passionarity” / пассионарность (willingness to sacrifice oneself for one’s values) or my own ideas on the sobornost’-poshlost’ / rationalism-mysticism belief matrix, in which a state of sobornost’, of course, refers to a high level of asabiya).

This is not surprising – military cooperation and morale is an important factor in military success. See the stunning successes of the early Islamic armies spreading the revelations of Mohammed, or of Nazi Germany. Later in the book, Turchin references the work of Trevor Dupuy, who showed that the Germans had a “combat efficiency” of 1.45, compared to the British 1.0 and American 1.1, in the battles on the western front of 1944 – in other words, excluding equipment and terrain, each Germany soldier was militarily “worth” 20% more than an Anglo-Saxon one.

Now why do some societies have higher asabiya than others? Ibn Khaldun’s analysis covered the dynamics of the desert / settled boundary in the North African Maghreb. Amongst the desert Bedouin tribes, constant inter-tribal warfare exerts group selective pressure favoring the emergence of tribes high in asabiya. These selective pressures are much weaker in settled civilizations with rule of law. Now these defects are more than made up for civilizations’ greater population density and better technologies, which can normally yield much bigger, better-equipped armies than anything the barbarians can muster. However, should civilization fall into a state of internal strife and social dissolution, it becomes “vulnerable to conquest from the desert” by a coalition of Bedouin tribes organized around one group with a particularly high asabiya. However, as soon as the barbarians become ensconced within their new domains, they gradually assimilate into the urban civilization, the high asabiya of the core group dissipates, and the cycle begins anew.

Turchin extends Ibn Khaldun’s beyond the Maghreb into a general theory of the rise of empires, almost all of which arise along “meta-ethnic frontiers” featuring bloody conflicts between starkly alien peoples. The constant military pressure and hatred for the Other binds the borderlanders together, fostering the relative economic equality, social solidarity, and discipline that will in time build an empire. Examples of this include the conflict of the Roman farmer-warriors against the Celtic barbarians of the Po Valley that melded the Latin peoples into the Roman Empire, the centuries-long struggle against the raiding, slave-taking steppe Hordes that incubated Muscovy’s rise, and the violent frontier wars against the Native Americans that formed the “melting pot” identity of the United States. The entire history of Europe from the Roman Empire to Poland-Lithuania has been characterized by the millennial, north-eastern drift of the meta-ethnic frontier between Rome/Christianity and tribal pagans, a frontier which repeatedly spawned new states and empires (Rome itself, the Caroliangian Empire, and the myriad Germanic and Slavic states.

2) The author notes that Ibn Khaldun’s blaming of “luxury” and “senility” for the degeneration of civilizations is an inadequate explanation, being nothing more than a biological metaphor with questionable applicability. Instead, Turchin lays out the theory of cliodynamics, the “mathematized history” that attempts to provide a comprehensive explanation of the “secular cycles” of imperial rise and fall by modeling Malthusian dynamics, i.e., when a great empire arises the resulting stability and prosperity produce overpopulation, which results in dearth, rising inequality (i.e. the old middle-class shrinks, while oligarchs and the landless indigent veer into prominence), and an intensified struggle for scarce resources that undermines social solidarity. Eventually, a severe shock such as a disastrous harvest, peasant uprisings, civil war, or foreign invasion provokes a full-fledged Malthusian crisis that triggers the collapse of the empire. I’ve already written about cliodynamics in detail here.

(Incidentally, I’ve also connected the decline of asabiya (or in my terminology, the transition from sobornost’ to poshlost’) to the socio-demographic cycles of cliodynamics. The theme of The Ages of Man, in which the bounteous Golden Age of the first dynasties (imperial rise) degenerates into the “immorality” and dearth of the Iron Age (social atomization, Malthusian stress, decline), – finally followed by an apocalyptic “cleansing” and start again (Malthusian collapse, barbarian invasions, Dark Ages, etc), is common to all civilizational traditions. See my Musings on the decline and fall of civilizations and explanation of the Malthusian Loop.)

3) Matthew 25:29: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”. In other words, there is a natural tendency for wealth to become concentrated in the hands of the few, called the Matthew Principle. In other words, if a pre-industrial civilization enjoys socio-political stability, has ineffective redistributive mechanisms, no free land / overpopulation, and a social mentality that accepts (or even glorifies – see “conspicuous consumption”) big levels of wealth inequality, within several generatons it will develop prodigal levels of social stratification. Wealth inequality tends to reach a maximum just before a collapse of the entire system: for instance, the Roman Empire fell for the last time just decades after reaching “peak inequality” in 400AD. Similar things can be said about the end of republican Rome, the decline of medieval France, and even Russia 1917 or Iran 1979.

Why does the Matthew Principle operate so strongly in Malthusian settings? In agrarian societies, private property is the normal way of storing inherited wealth. If a family has lots of children, each one will inherit ever smaller plots. To make ends meet, they will be eventually forced to borrow loans; if they can’t, their land is taken over by their creditors, and they now have to hire themselves out as agricultural laborers or drift into the cities where they can try to join a trade (hence the reason why cities expand so much in times of subsistence stress). Meanwhile, those who have land can 1) rent it out at exorbitant rates (since the demand for it is so high in an overpopulated country) or 2) they can sell the grain their tenants or serfs produce at high prices (again because there are more mouths to feed). The resulting accumulation of drifting unemployed are matchwood for social unrest (e.g. see the role of the sans-culottes in the French Revolution).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the social spectrum, the elites or nobility grow at a faster rate than the commoners because they have better access to food and can afford more children, and die less quickly. Those with land benefit from cheaper labor and the rise in rent prices, while manufactures become easier to afford thanks to the increase in trade and urban artisans. However, intra-elite inequality also increases, and there is increasing tension as some poor nobles see peasant arrivistes rising above them in social status. Because the king depends on the nobles for governing his kingdom, state institutions must be expanded to “feed” all those nobles who are left out of inheritances, fostering corruption, aristocratic intrigues, and social stratification. Those at the very top of the social pyramid engage in the most extravagant conspicuous consumption, provoking envy amongst the have-nots. All these widening social chasms reduce the society’s asabiya.

The plagues, wars, and internal violence unleashed by Malthusian collapse tends to kill off most of the top and bottom of the social period. The landless indigent starve to death, or their weakened immune systems succumb to disease, or they get carried away as the cannon fodder in the uprisings that wrack the failed state. The nobles also die fast, thanks to their status as a military caste. Generational cycles of violence and wars and political purges carry many of them off. After the collapse, land becomes cheaper and labor becomes more expensive. Subsistence stress largely subsides and society becomes much more egalitarian. The cycle begins anew.

Criticisms and Consequences

I think Turchin’s book is a good introductory text to the new science of cliodynamics, one he himself did much to found (along with Nefedov and Korotayev). However, though readable – mostly, I suspect, because I am interested in the subject – it is not well-written. The text was too thick, there were too many awkward grammatical constructions, and the quotes are far, far too long.

More importantly, 1) the theory is not internally well-integrated and 2) there isn’t enough emphasis on the fundamental differences separating agrarian from industrial societies. For instance, Turchin makes a lot of the idea that the Italians’ low level of asabiya (“amoral familism”) was responsible for it’s only becoming politically unified in the late 19th century. But why then was it the same for Germany, the bloody frontline for the religious wars of the 17th century? And why was France able to build a huge empire under Napoleon, when it had lost all its “meta-ethnic frontiers” / marches by 1000 AD? For answers to these questions about the genesis of the modern nation-state, one would be much better off by looking at more conventional explanations by the likes of Benedict Anderson, Charles Tilly, or Gabriel Ardant.

Nowadays, modern political technologies – the history textbook, the Monument to the Unknown Soldier, the radio and Internet - have long displaced the meta-ethnic frontier as the main drivers behind the formation of asabiya. Which is certainly not to say that meta-ethnic frontiers are unimportant – they are, especially in the case of Dar al-Islam, which feels itself to be under siege on multiple fronts (the “bloody borders” of clash-of-civilizations-speak), which according to Turchin’s theory should promote a stronger Islamic identity. But their intrinsic importance has been diluted by the influence of modern media.

Turchin has an interesting discussion of the future of the US, China, Russia, and the European Union based on the conclusions of War and Peace and War. In particular, one very relevant point he made is that to become a true empire, the EU requires 1) the development of a European-wide loyalty towards it, willing to shed blood for it, and 2) its core state, Germany, must continue to underwrite it financially. None of these conditions, I think it is safe to say, will be met. As I’ve recently pointed out, Germany is most emphatically not prepared to sacrifice its national interests in favor of a European project over which it does not have direct control; the Germans have their own problems, foremost among them the demographic aging of the population. Furthermore, only 37% of Germans are today prepared to fight for their own country, according to the findings of the World Values Survey*; if that is the case, then how many Germans would fight (and risk death) for the Brussels bureaucracy? 5% would probably be generous. Quite simply the EU does not have any foundations for an imperial future, nor the will to create one; it is very fragile and will start unraveling at the smallest shocks.

Another major problem with the book that makes it incomplete is that although Turchin touches and speculates about the modern world and the future – in particular, he notes that the rising inequality, crime rates, slower growth, etc, of the post-1960′s industrialized world is similar to the traditional symptoms of an emerging Malthusian crisis – he does not connect the dots with the Limits to Growth, the theory that explicitly states that we are being swept into a Malthusian crisis due to global overpopulation and resource depletion. This is a far more important development than the techno-hype he devotes much of the last chapter to.

In the end I gave a 4/5 for this book, although it could have potentially gotten 5*/5. Turchin did valuable work in emphasizing how the material (e.g. the Malthusian) interacts with the spiritual (asabiya) in history, whereas many lesser theorists regard the latter as a “mystical” factor unworthy of serious attention. However, the book suffered from 1) poor writing, 2) too many marginal details that should have been edited out, and 3) unsuccessful application of the theory to the current, post-agrarian era. He should either have left it out entirely, or spent a lot more time doing it better.

* From the latest “wave” of the World Values Survey, “Of course, we all hope that there will not be another war, but if it were to come to that, would you be willing to fight for your country?” I think this question is an excellent way of gauging asabiya in a nation, since it directly addresses the issue of life, death, and self-sacrifice. The results are very interesting.

The Scandinavian countries – limp-wristed feminist socialists that they are – all say a resounding “yes” (Sweden 86%, Norway 88%, Finland 84%). Similarly, for all the problems of the post-Communist transition, Eastern European nations also retain high levels of asabiya (Poland 75%, Russia 83%, Georgia 70%), though Serbia 61% is lower (maybe because they’ve already fought) and so is Ukraine 69% (its Russophones aren’t as loyal as West or Central Ukrainians). Most of the Muslim countries say “yes” (Iran 81%, Egypt 80%, Morocco 77%), including a whopping 97% in Turkey. Iraq 37% is the sole outlier. Similarly, the Asian nations also have high levels of patriotism (China 87%, India 81%, South Korea 73%).

The United States 63% isn’t as high as one might think, and curiously close to France 61%, Great Britain 62%, and the rest of the Anglo-Saxon world. The nations of Latin America tend to have similar figures. The Mediterranean countries, the old countries, and the countries defeated in World War Two are the last willing to put their lives on the line for their nation (Italy 43%, Spain 45%, Japan 25%, Germany 37%).

1. Rising tensions over the Falkland Islands between Argentina and the UK, following the discovery of oil in the region and Britain’s decision to start exploration drilling. Contrary to media hype, war is not imminent; even though Britain, like the US, suffers from “imperial overstretch” and a military-industrial “death spiral”, it is still far, far more powerful than Argentina. The Royal Navy has the world’s second best “power projection” capabilities (amphibious, logistics, aeronaval). Argentina’s military power, never impressive to begin with, has only stagnated since 1982.

On the other hand, this episode does represent two important things. First, the geopolitical factors that constitute negative feedback loops to the resource extraction sector that supports the global industrial system. For instance, as oil production peaks, we can expect an accelerating scramble for the remaining reserves. This may yield short-term benefits for the stronger Powers that will emerge victorious in the neo-colonial gunboat wars of the future, but will accelerate the decline at the global level. Second, we find that most Latin American countries expressed their support for Argentina, even including regional rivals like Brazil and Chile. This illustrates the rising prominence of the “World Without the West” / “Clash of Civilizations” paradigms that will replace neoliberal internationalism in the coming age of scarcity industrialism.

However, I must emphasize that these are incipient trends, not current realities. For now, the overwhelming fact on the ground is that 1) Argentina is weak and 2) it can only count on rhetorical support from its neighbors, not military (Brazil has no particular interest in allowing Argentina to become a potential challenger to its regional hegemony). However, many things can change within a decade. As I wrote earlier, Britain faces a panoply of problems – fiscal, debt, energy, separatism, etc – that will critically undermine its international power, including the ability to sustain the current scope of its armed forces. (In this respect, it is essentially a microcosm of the United States). Meanwhile, though it has plenty of its own problems, Argentina has shown signs that it has outgrown out of its traditional fiscal problems. Following six years of very fast growth, it was little affected by the 2008 economic crisis, its public finances are not unduly bad by global standards, and looking further ahead, its agricultural and natural resource wealth stand it in good stead for the coming age of scarcity industrialism.

If Argentina pursues a rational military procurement and modernization program (amphibious ships, cruise missiles, modern diesel subs, UAV’s, etc) - and assuming it is not once again derailed by the mismanagement and corruption that made it into a unique specimen of a country that went from “developed” to “developing” status after 1950 – then the military balance may swing sufficiently wide in its favor as to enable it to contemplate a successful military solution to the Las Malvinas issue by 2020.

2. Shortly after penning an anti-guvmint screed, Joe Stack crashed his plane into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, in a symbolic copycatting of 9/11. Though legally an unequivocal terrorist (as defined by the PATRIOT Act), he is fast becoming a folk hero amongst the Tea Partiers.

Though I don’t care to comment much on the ethical and moral issues, this does shed light on pertinent current trends. Foremost, the growing disillusionment with the System, the increasing perception by the citizenry that the United States is becoming a “hypertrophied state” hijacked by connected elites, who use it to cushion themselves with corporate socialism while pushing capitalism on the rest. In terms of the Belief Matrix, the country is beginning to lose belief in itself (“rejection of tradition”) and move away from rational-liberalism towards the illiberal populism and patrimonialism that is the common refuge of many post-collapse societies. Also recalls this line from Tainter’s Collapse of Complex Societies:

According to RM Adams, “By the fifth century, men were ready to abandon civilization itself in order to escape the fearful load of taxes”.

Would this action have any real effect? Rehashing the arguments of proponents of the “propaganda of the deed”, Baudrillard would argue that it would have a profound symbolic impact.

The terrorist hypothesis is that the system itself suicides in response to the multiple challenges of death and suicide. Neither the system, nor power, themselves escape symbolic obligation -and in this trap resides the only chance of their demise (catastrophe). In this vertiginous cycle of the impossible exchange of death, the terrorist death is an infinitesimal point that provokes a gigantic aspiration, void and convection. Around this minute point, the whole system of the real and power gains in density, freezes, compresses, and sinks in its own super-efficacy. The tactics of terrorism are to provoke an excess of reality and to make the system collapse under the weight of this excess. The very derision of the situation, as well as all the piled up violence of power, flips against it, for terrorist actions are both the magnifying mirror of the system’s violence, and the model of a symbolic violence that it cannot access, the only violence it cannot exert: that of its own death. This is why all this visible power cannot react against the minute, but symbolic death of a few individuals.

But in this case Trotsky’s analysis is the more persuasive.

But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? If it makes sense to terrify highly placed personages with the roar of explosions, where is the need for the party? Why meetings, mass agitation and elections if one can so easily take aim at the ministerial bench from the gallery of parliament?

In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses. Theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education. But the smoke from the confusion clears away, the panic disappears, the successor of the murdered minister makes his appearance, life again settles into the old rut, the wheel of capitalist exploitation turns as before; only the police repression grows more savage and brazen. And as a result, in place of the kindled hopes and artificially aroused excitement comes disillusionment and apathy.

3. Yushenko goes out with a provocative bang, making Galician nationalist / Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera into a “Hero of Ukraine”. With Tymoshenko’s challenge to the election results dismissed, the new Ukrainian President is now Yanukovych, who represents the Russophone, pro-Russian eastern and southern regions and Donbass oligarchs. This should come as no surprise to S/O readers, given that I predicted Yanukovych would win the second round from the beginning. (Pic h/t @ Ukrainiana).

According to the election results, the final tally was Yanukovych 49%, Tymoshenko 45%. This was stunningly similar to the result I predicted from analyzing which other candidates’ supporters would vote for Mr. Blue or the Gas Princess.

Adding up these figures, Yanukovych gets 50% of the votes, whereas Tymoshenko gets 46%.

The only question now remaining is how fast Yanukovych will now move Ukraine back into Russia’s orbit, perhaps starting with entry into the Russia-Belarus-Kazakhstan customs union.

4. The Airborne Laser (ABL), mounted on a modified Boeing 747, finally succeeded in “killing” a low-tech Scud missile in testing. Yes, not very impressive so far. The range was short and the second test failed anyway. But the regular mechanical breakdowns of the first WW1 tanks, far from invalidating the concepts of armored warfare, were instead portents of the future. What we are seeing is nothing less than the dawning of the age of automated laser weaponry.

5. Its official. Russia’s population grew by 23,300 souls in 2009, for the first time since 1995. Though the rate of natural increase remained slightly negative for Russia as a whole (the Siberian and Urals Federal Regions actually saw positive natural population growth for the first time in 19 years), this was more than compensated for by immigration.

This improvement was in large part thanks to an impressive increase in the life expectancy, which rose to 69 years in 2009 – almost as high as in 1963-68 (before the alcoholism epidemic) and 1986-91 (Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. Birth rates also increased by 3%, hysterical Russophobe predictions of a crisis-induced “abortion apocalypse” to the contrary.

This of course should come as no great surprise to S/O readers, since back in mid-2008 my projections indicated that:

Russia will see positive population growth starting from 2010 at the latest.

Natural population increase will occur starting from 2013 at the latest.

Russia’s total life expectancy will exceed 68 years by 2010 and reach 75 years by 2020.

Now according to my models, in the case of a total fertility rate of 1.5 (i.e., the same as in 2008, when it was 1.49, so that is actually discounting any further increases) and assuming a very modest life expectancy rise (74 years by 2025 – it is already close at 69), and 300k annual migration (currently around 200-250k), “the population size will remain basically stagnant, going from 142mn to 143mn by 2023 before slowly slipping down to 138mn by 2050″. Of course it is also entirely possible that Russia’s LE will converge to developed-country levels quicker and that the TFR will stabilize at 1.7-1.8, in which case its population may grow back to around 150mn by 2025.

Thus far, the reality of Russia’s demographic turn-around is actually exceeding both Rosstat‘s and my own most optimistic forecasts (not to even mention “pessimists” like Eberstadt, Steyn, etc). No wonder that pundits are beginning to read and propagandize the gist of my articles, e.g. from Mark Adomanis at True Slant (h/t poemless).

1) Its population is in steep decline and chronically afflicted by alcoholism.

These are actually two very separate issues, but what the hell, why not, we’ll combine them. As I’ve argued before Russia’s population decline has actually abated rather dramatically. What is Russia’s demographic future? No one really knows (predictions are hard, especially about the future!), but it stands to reason that it’s not nearly as bad as Black, Eberstadt, Steyn, Feshbach, and all the other nameless neocon apparatchiks,  most of whom have made crude linear projections decades into the future, think. And alcoholism in Russia is not some eternal unchanging constant: the country’s current high rates of alcoholism are the result of a trend that started in the 1960’s, not in prehistory. Alcoholism in Russia was and is largely a reaction to bleak socioeconomic conditions and the easy availability and cheapness of alcohol,not the result of some quasi-mythical Russian predilection for booze and penchant for self destruction. Will this trend be reversed? Perhaps! Perhaps not! The truth is no one really knows, but to pretend that Russians are utterly passive in the face of some all-powerful and immutable force known as “alcoholism” is as condescending as it is stupid.

Now the next question – should I now rest on my laurels, or should I continue trying to refute the demographic doomers who continue to insist that Russia’s population will fall to 128mn within two decades?

6. Goldman Sachs helped Greece conceal its deficit spending shenanigans by providing it with loans disguised as currency trades. Can this get any dodgier? This also introduces an interesting philosophical exercise – who’s more responsible, the bank(st)ers or the politicos? (The drug pushers or the drug abusers?). And of course Greece is far from alone. The real elephant in the room is the United States.

7. Russian Twitter hero and unabashed patriot, Dmitri Rogozin, proves that Western diplomats are girly men.

8. Two stories that represent the two most important trends of our world systems – shortage of Rare Earth Metals could thwart innovation (limits to growth) and 10 profound innovations ahead (technological progress). If we could find some way to figure out which trend is the stronger and more stable one, you could make a good guess as to the meaning of the 21st century.

9. What blogging is all about… (h/t Lou).

10. Yulia Latynina, Russian liberal par excellence (that is, in the anti-democratic 19th century sense of “liberal”), on why Letting Poor People Vote is Dangerous. At least she is brave enough (or stupid enough?) to say what many liberasts think, but don’t have the guts to do so outright. H/t Sean.

Viktor Yanukovych’s victory in Sunday’s presidential election — not unlike the victories of former Chilean President Salvador Allende, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Adolf Hitler — once again raises doubt about the basic premise of democracy: that the people are capable of choosing their own leader. Unfortunately, only wealthy people are truly capable of electing their leaders in a responsible manner. Poor people elect politicians like Yanukovych or Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

When the Orange Revolution hit Ukraine five years ago, the people arose in a united wave and did not allow themselves to be deceived by the corrupt elite. That elite had reached an agreement with the criminals and oligarchs of Donetsk to make a minor criminal, who could not string two sentences together, the successor to former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma.

And by far my favorite bit:

Can you imagine U.S. voters putting a leader in the White House who is a puppet of the ruling elite and criminal clans?

Socialist democrat Allende = genocidal maniac Hitler? The same US whose regulatory bodies are captured by Wall Street, which confirmed itself as an oligarchy with the recent removal of campaign funding limits for corporations? (I can just about see a few post-peak oil decades down the line Exxon oligarchs sending American conscripts to fight national liberation movements in Saudi Arabia or Nigeria).

Really, why the fuck does anyone act surprised that Russia’s limousine liberals – part disconnected elitist, part neo-Bolshevik, part plain insane – only have the support of 3% of the Russian population?

PS. More inane rantings from Latynina. It appears her disdain for facts extends well beyond Russian politics.

“The global warming is an invention of the global bureaucracy,” says one of Russia’s leading journalists and authors, Yulia Latynina, who in most of her publications exposes controversial activities by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“The IPCC are unable to explain to me why the 10th century and the 16th century in Europe were far warmer than it is today. They are unable even to tell what the weather tomorrow is going to be like, that is doing something that can be verified,” Latynina says in a weekly magazine. “One simple question – why do they think that warmth is bad? Did the human race drown or perish in the 10-13th centuries?”

The global warming threat, she believes “is one of the brightest illustrations of the Global Bureaucracy’s ideology, a phenomenon that is still largely embryonic. But if the current trend continues, it may spell the end of the Western civilization, freedom and progress in science and engineering.”

11. Back in the real world, the news from the climate front, as usual, gets worse by the month if not the week.

Organizers of the recent climate conference in Copenhagen sought, unsuccessfully, to forge agreements to limit global warming to 2 degrees C by the end of the century. But even an increase that small would cause deadly harm. And far greater damage is likely if we do nothing.The numbers — and there are many to choose from — paint a grim picture. According to recent estimates from the Integrated Global Systems Model at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the median forecast is for a climb of 5 degrees C by century’s end, in the absence of effective countermeasures. That forecast, however, may underestimate the increase. According to the same M.I.T. model, there is a 10 percent chance that the average global temperature will rise more than 7 degrees C by 2100, and a 3 percent chance it will climb more than 8 degrees C. Warming on that scale would be truly catastrophic. Scientists say that even the 2-degree increase would spell widespread loss of life, so it’s hardly alarmist to view the risk of inaction as frightening… (The M.I.T. model estimates a zero probability of the temperature rising by less than 3.6 degrees by 2100.)

You bet. A rise of more than 5 degrees C will result in a global collapse of food production and the almost certain demise of industrial civilization. At above 7 degrees C, we may well be looking at human extinction as “zones of uninhabitability” begin to overspread much of the world.

An adaptability limit for large warmings–are we accounting for it?

Steven Sherwood(1), M Huber(2)
(1) Yale University, Department of Geology and Geophysics, New Haven, CT, USA
(2) Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

The consequences of large warmings (>4C), which on current trends look increasingly likely in the 21stcentury if not the 20th, have received little attention. It seems to be widely assumed that humans can adapt to any amount of warming, on the basis that humans live in such a wide variety of climates now. We show that when examined in terms of the peak value of the wet-bulb temperature (Tw), which ultimately governs the possibility of transfer of metabolic heat to the environment, the world’s present-day climates are far less variable than one might think based on mean temperature. A warming of only a few degrees will cause large parts of the globe to experience peak Tw values that never occur today; 7C would begin to create zones of uninhabitability due to unsurvivable peak heat stresses (periods when the shedding of metabolic heat isthermodynamically impossible); and 10C would expand such zones far enough to encompass a majority of today’s population. It is unknown how much of our present 7-10C cushion we can live without before experiencing significant problems, making it difficult to draw conclusions about more modest climatechanges, but the limits themselves rest squarely on basic thermodynamics. These inferences stand in contradiction to damage functions currently used in economic cost-benefit calculations. In these, climate damages increase with global mean temperature according to a polynomial form, and remain moderate (typically <30% of GDP) even for 10C or more despite the implication that most of the surface wouldbecome uninhabitable by humans and most livestock during the warm season…

12. Meanwhile, AGW deniers continue spreading their malicious lies and propaganda over the Internet like a horde of virtual locusts. See IPCC errors: facts and spin at Real Climate for a thorough debunking of their mendacious drivel.

13. Something a bit more encouraging. Old dude beats up pathetic wannabe gangsta on a public bus.

14. An intriguing attempt to rank national naval strengths from Strategy Page – Naval Forces of the World. Unsurprisingly, the US completely dominates with more than half the global naval power. The only other navies of real strength are considered to be the UK, Russia, Japan, China, and France. I more or less agree with this analysis, excpet to note that 1) the importance of specifics – whereas the UK has much better “power projection”, Russia’s strategic naval forces are far ahead and second only to the US, and 2) China’s naval power is growing rapidly, it will soon overtake Japan if it hasn’t already, and by 2020 may even be ahead of the US.

15. China sells $34.2bn of US treasury bonds, indicating its loss of confidence in the credibility of any US promises to ever rein back on its fiscal overstretch. The only nations still buying up US Treasuries are geopolitically-aligned ones (e.g. Japan) and private investors, but the endgame for Pax Americana has begun and the next global credit or geopolitical shock may finish it. Meanwhile, Tokyo welcomes Chinese destroyer. Perhaps this doesn’t mean anything important, or perhaps it is just the beginning of Japan’s road towards bandwagoning with China.

16. Andrey Ternovskiy, a Russian, is behind the site ChatRoulette which anonymously pairs you up with random Internet strangers via webcam. Sounds like the perfect hangout for weirdos… and it is. Wouldn’t recommend it unless you’re interested in live gay porn.

17. Turkish Foreign Minister Calls for Eurasian Union (Leos Tomicek). Turkey is a rising power with energy, cultural, and political interests in Central Asia and the Middle East, and it will be freer to expand once NATO / the West starts becoming irrelevant.

18. Economic catastrophe in Latvia, previously hailed as a “Baltic tiger”. Latvia’s Economy Contracts Almost 18 Percent in Q4 2009 (Ed Hughes). From his Facebook updates:

“Latvia’s GDP fell by 17.7% year on year in the last quarter of 2009,meaning the economy has now shrunk by more than 25 percent in twoyears. The IMF projects another 4 percent drop this year and predictsthat the total loss of output from peak to bottom will reach 30percent. This would make Latvia’s loss more than that of the U.S. Great Depression downturn of 1929-1933.”

“The consequence of this strong recession in Latvia – more and moreLatvians are leaving in search of work elsewhere, while fewer andfewer young people feel confident enough to have children, making thelong term future of the country even more uncertain.”

There follows a graph of Latvia’s birth rates plummeting by around 8% in 2009 y/y, with the rate of decline accelerating to 12% by December 2009.

Perhaps a timely reminder of the dangers of too much economic openness, the (prior?) dogma of our times? In comparison, Russia’s GDP fell by 7.9% and Belarus’ GDP actually grew 0.2% in 2009, and both saw continuing demographic improvements.

19. On my reading list:

The Lucifer Principle – Nietzschean book by Howard Bloom. (h/t Lou).

The Sea of Fertility – Yukio Mishima, my new hero, whose ritual suicide consitutes the epitome of artistic holism.

The Rediscovery of the Mind – Cognitive science is ”the ongoing research program of showing Searle’s Chinese Room Argument to be false”, and it’s not hard to see why.

Towards a New Socialism – Haven’t started reading this year, but looking forwards to it since it’s connected with many of my own ideas about how advances in cybernetics and computer science is making central planning feasible, even for highly complex and advanced economic systems.

Getting ready to post reviews of The Peak Oil Books, When the Rivers Run Dry (Pearce), and The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil).