I have decided to strip out these elements and focus only on indicators that can be objectively measured, i.e. the numbers of killed and imprisoned journalists set against the size of the national journalistic pool. Using figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists, I tally the numbers of journalist murders from the past three years – to reflect the fact that journalist killings can have a chilling effect years into the future – and the numbers of imprisoned journalists imprisoned now multiplied by six, so that their aggregate weighting is twice that of journalist killings. The reason I do that is because truly authoritarian regimes typically have a tight clampdown on monopoly violence, including on the various independent criminal elements (e.g. drug cartels, rogue intelligence officers); as such, direct killings of journalists tends to be rare. On the other hand, due to the threat of imprisonment and other harassment, independent journalism is severely circumscribed if at all existent. But instead of just going with this figure, I further adjust it to the size of the national journalist pool, because – for obvious reasons – a few journalist killings in a country the size of India is tragic, but nonetheless qualitatively different from the same number of killings in a country with a far smaller population like Honduras where there is a far bigger chance those journalists would know each other. The resulting figure is the Journalism Security Index; a narrower (but far more objective) measure than the Press Freedom Index, which – by necessity – relies on fallible expert judgments on unquantifiable measures such as self-censorship and journalistic independence.

Scroll down to the bottom to see the full results of the Journalism Security Index 2012.

Some of the rankings will come as a surprise to many people, so let me address those. First, we see a few countries where press freedoms are certainly heavily circumscribed, such as Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Vietnam, get perfect scores. This reveals the major weakness of the index – it measures not so much press freedom as journalistic security (hence its name). Second, and tied in with this, it only measures the most severe things that can happen to a journalism, i.e. killing or imprisonment. It has no way of accounting for things such as Hungary’s new media laws, the rumored weekly meetings of Russia’s federal TV channel heads with Kremlin officials, or the 42 journalists and counting arrested at Occupy events in the US. Suffice to say that a score of zero on the JSI most certainly does not mean said country is an oasis of press freedom.

This is also not to mention that the CPJ has a fairly rigorous methodology for listing a journalist as imprisoned – it has to be political. For instance, while Turkey “only” has 7 journalists listed as imprisoned, other estimates put the number at more than 70. However, according to Yavuz Baydar, a similar methodology may give a figure of 17 imprisoned journalists in the UK for their part in the News of the World phone hacking scandal. Obviously, a line has to be drawn somewhere.

Third, there may be surprise that Russia is ranked somewhere in the middle, whereas it is near the bottom on most other indices of press freedom. The explanation is fairly simple. Russia does not currently have any imprisoned journalists by the CPJ’s reckoning, and whereas a total of four journalist deaths are recorded for the years 2009-2011, this is both a significant decrease on earlier years and not a catastrophic situation when set against its 143 million strong population (see Gordon Hahn’s Repression of Journalism in Russia in Comparative Perspective from December 2009) or – to be even fairer – the vast size of its journalistic pool, which at 102,300 newspaper journalists is the largest in the world.

On the converse, countries such as Bahrain, Syria, and Afghanistan do really badly because even a small number of journalist killings and imprisonments translate into very high scores because of the hugely circumscribed size of the journalistic pools in those countries. Some may dispute that Israel’s ranking is absurdly low. If so, please take it up with the CPJ. It lists 7 imprisoned journalists; now of them, 3 are under Hamas arrest, so I subtracted them from the Israeli total and gave them to Palestine. Nonetheless, that still leaves 4 Palestinian journalists that are under Israeli imprisonment, all of them without charge.

(In contrast, the sole Russian journalist listed as imprisoned in recent years was one Boris Stomakhin for “inciting hatred” and “making public calls for extremist activity”, writing things such as, “Let tens of new Chechen snipers take their positions in the mountain ridges and the city ruins and let hundreds, thousands of aggressors fall under righteous bullets! No mercy! Death to the Russian occupiers! … The Chechens have the full moral right to bomb everything they want in Russia.” One may dispute the ethics of imprisoning someone for what is, in the end, still an opinion; but one has to note that prosecutions take place in the UK (Samina Malik) and the US (Jubair Ahmad) for essentially equivalent activities).

Whereas countries like Brazil and Mexico have essentially free media, they are – as are Russia and much of the rest of the former Soviet republics – terrorized by the generally high background violence of their societies. In the former, this issue is particularly problematic, as Brazil has a much lower aggregate press pool than Russia; therefore, its three murders in the past three years exert more of a relative effect than Russia’s four.

Please make sure to note the caveats and methodological clarifications that follow below the following table.

Journalism Security Index 2012

Methodological clarifications: Impr. figures taken from CPJ‘s 2011 Prison Census; Kill. figures taken from CPJ’s numbers of killed journalists from 2009 to 2011; #pop. taken from Wikipedia’s list of official statistics on national populations; #journ. taken from UN data on the numbers of journalists per country.

JSI(p) is the Journalism Security Index calculated only relative to the population; it is more accurate, in narrow terms, than the JSI calculated relative to numbers of journalists (see below why), but suffers from the fact that it underestimates the risks of working in very populous and poor countries where journalists are low as a share of the population and even a few killings can have a chilling effect on their general community.

JSI is the official Journalism Security Index, calculated by (1) tallying the numbers of journalist murders from 2009-2011 and the numbers of imprisoned journalists imprisoned in 2011 multiplied by six so that the aggregate weighting of every imprisoned journalist is twice that of a killed journalist, (2) dividing by the numbers of newspaper journalists in that country, and (3) multiplying that figure by 10,000 to get convenient numbers for the index.

There are two very important caveats to be made about the UN data on journalists. First, it only measures the numbers of newspaper journalists, not the total number of journalists and media workers. As such, it should be viewed as a rough proxy. In some regions, newspapers have a much higher profile relative to TV (e.g. East-Central Europe, Russia, Scandinavia); in others, it is the opposite (e.g. Latin America). Adjusting for this would, for example, narrow the gap between in the JSI between Russia and Brazil. Second, far from all countries have data; many of them are fairly important ones in terms of press freedom issues (e.g. Iran, Israel, Mexico, Bahrain). To fix this, I just extrapolated the per capita figures from other countries with similar literacy and socio-cultural profiles, e.g. I equalized Iran and Mexico with Turkey; Israel and Belarus with Russia; Bahrain with Qatar, and calculated their numbers of journalists by multiplying their population by their estimated journalists per capita figures. Needless to say, this is an extremely inexact method, and may be off by several factors. For that reason, countries with no concrete data from the UN source are marked in italics; note that for them, the JSI may be off by several factors (though most likely not by an order of magnitude).

In the US, a black homeless man “robs” a bank. He only takes a single $100 bill out of the wad of cash offered, because he was hungry and had to pay to stay at a detox center. Regardless, he had the good graces to return the money the day after. Net financial loss to the bank? $0. Years he was sent down to the slammer for: 15.

In another country, a billionaire fleeces the state by using offshore companies to sell his company’s oil production (and sees nothing wrong with it). Politicians and businessmen who oppose him get this nasty habit of turning up dead. Net financial loss to that country’s treasury, and ultimately taxpayers? Many billions of dollars. Years he was sent down to the slammer for: 14.

Now imagine that one of these cases becomes the focal point of universal condemnation of that country’s brutal, lawless, and authoritarian human rights regime – from Amnesty International and PACE, the US State Department and the German Bundestag, and regular scathing editorials from the biggest media titans. The country’s own liberals work overtime to campaign for the case to be overturned.

Which case would you guess I’m talking about? Surely it would be Roy Brown, the indigent beggar right? No way, sucker.

Letters, we get letters, we get lots of cards and letters every day. Even fan mail from La Russophobe!

Letter to the Editor: Reply to “Given Free Publicity On NTV, Khodorkovsky Only Incriminates Himself Further” (06/11/2011).

In a recent blog post, you touted a report about Mikhail Khodorkovsky on state-owned Russian TV channel NTV. Your post, which implied the Russian Kremlin is being open about its prosecution of Khodorkovsky, was grossly misleading.

You failed to notice that this reporting came only after Khodorkovsky’s conviction. You also failed to notice that public ignorance about the trial itself increased dramatically from 2005, clearly showing that the Kremlin hid the entire proceeding from the public when it counted.

By contrast, you grossly mischaracterize Western reporting of the recent EHCR verdict relating to Khodorkovsky. Contrary to your false claim, a vast number of Western outlets touted the court’s refusal to find Khodorkovsky’s conviction political.

You also mischaracterize the EHCR verdict itself, as did numerous Western reports. The verdict permits Khodorkovsky’s lawyers to submit additional evidence showing political motivation and does not find no such motivation was present. Instead, the decision merely finds that sufficient evidence for a conviction on that point has not yet been submitted, and the court’s rules require a truly profound showing in this regard.

You totally ignore the numerous convictions handed down against the Kremlin by the EHCR for grossly violating Khodorkovsky’s legal rights, actions which the court called “inhuman.” In other words, a stunning formal European pronouncement of Russian barbarism. The Kremlin is now Khodorkovsky’s debtor to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, and there are numerous other challenges by Khodorkovsky’s lawyers to the Kremlin’s illegal actions still pending the European courts.

Predictably, you also totally ignore the ludicrous nature of accusing Khodorkovsky of stealing hundreds of millions of tons of oil, and you ignore the unquestionable fact that Putin has failed to keep his promise to purge Russia of oligarchs. All he has in fact done is to purge the oligarchs who are not pro-Putin, blithely allowing those close to him to continue doing exactly the same things for which Khodorkovsky rots in Siberia.

In short, far from confirming honesty and openness on the part of Khodorkovsky’s foes, your post merely shows in detail how their mendacity and subterfuge continue.

Yours truly,

La Russophobe

But I found only one thing noteworthy in particular. When asked in the May 29th program on what he thought about the reduction of his sentence by one year, Khodorkovsky replied: “I’m uninterested in the cosmetic tricks of the judicial bureaucrats. The statement that oil in Siberia has to be sold at Rotterdam prices is too bizarre to comment on.” Read between the lines. Of course it’s rational – as opposed to bizarre – to sell it to your offshore companies at low prices, thus robbing the Russian government of tax revenue, before selling it at world prices and profiting off the difference. That is essentially what he was convicted of and as I see it he so much as admitted it.

He also restated his conviction that his prosecution is politically motivated, thus going against a recent ruling of the European Court of Human Rights. That story was passed over quickly, as Western pundits continue shilling for Khodorkovsky for all they’re worth.

As I explained in previous posts on this blog, it suffers from numerous flaws. Part of it has to do with its questionable methodology: using changing mixes of different surveys to gauge a fluid, opaque-by-definition social phenomenon. Another is its reliance on its appeal to authority, the theory being that “experts” in business and think-tanks know more about corruption relative to anyone else. Countries with more regulations are systematically prejudged, as are those facing hostile media environments such as Russia or Venezuela. Above all, the CPI doesn’t pass the face validity test – in other words, many of its results are frankly ludicrous. Is it truly plausible that Russia (2.1) is as corrupt as failed states like Zimbabwe (2.4) or D.R. Congo (2.0), or that Italy (3.9) is more corrupt than Saudi Arabia (4.7) which is a feudalistic monarchy!?

This suggests that we urgently need another, more objective index. Thus I present the Corruption Realities Index (CRI)!

Unlike my previous attempt at this, the Karlin Corruption Index – which was rightly critiqued for being no less subjective than the CPI (though I do believe it was more accurate) – this time round I am drawing on real world data. In particular, there are three corruption indices that aren’t as well known as the CPI, but far more useful.

One of them is Transparency International’s less well-known Global Corruption Barometer. Every year, they poll respondents on the following question: “In the past 12 months have you or anyone living in your household paid a bribe?” The answers hint at the prevalence of corruption in everyday life, as experienced by a sample of normal people, and as such they almost certainly offer a better picture than the perceptions of experts who are prone to the narrative fallacy and are unduly influenced by the ideological biases of the international business media (e.g. op-eds in The Economist or the WSJ). A good example is the reputational fallout Russia experienced in the wake of the prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, which saw its CPI retreat despite the lack of any noticeable increase in corruption on the ground.

Another key resource is the Global Integrity Report, which evaluates countries on their “actually existing” Legal Frameworks and Actual Implementation on issues such as “the transparency of the public procurement process, media freedom, asset disclosure requirements, and conflicts of interest regulations.” This involves line by line examination of the laws in question, and the “de facto realities of practical implementation.” Crucially, the assessments are blindly reviewed by a panel of peer reviewers and outside experts, which is an important antidote to bias.

Finally, there is the International Budget Partnership, which – believe it or not – assesses budget transparency and accountability. It compiles an Open Budget Index on the basis of factors such as budget documents availability, and the effectiveness of oversight by legislatures and supreme audit institutions. People who think of Eastern Europe as a black hole of government corruption will be surprised to learn that it is the best performing region after the developed world, while the Middle East, China, and sub-Saharan Africa are distinguished by their opacity.

Data from all three sources – to the extent that it is available – is amalgamated and fed through a formula to produce the Corruption Realities Index.

GCB is the percentage of people saying they or their households paid a bribe in the past 12 months from 2010 data. GILF is the Global Integrity Legal Framework score. GIAI is the Global Integrity Actual Implementation score. Most Global Integrity data is from 2007-2010. OBI is the Open Budget Index score from 2010 data. The CRI is the Corruption Realities Index. More details are given at the bottom of the table.

* The Global Integrity scores for Legal Framework and Actual Implementation were given as one averaged figure, so bear in mind that
† Global Integrity scores were collected for 2006 or earlier, so may no longer be up to date.
The CRI for countries in italics was generated on the basis of only one piece of data, the percentage of people saying they or someone in their household paid a bribe in the last year. As such, their CRI has a high margin of error.

Formulas

1. For countries with all four data points. (10-sqrt(GCB))*5 + (GILF + GIAI)/5 + sqrt(OBI) = CRI, with the GCB/GILF/GIAI/OBI weighted 50-20-20-10.
2. For countries with no OBI. (10-sqrt(GCB))*5 + (GILF + GIAI)/4 = CRI, with the GCB/GILF/GIAI weighted 50-25-25.
3. For countries with no Global Integrity data. (10-sqrt(GCB))*7.5 + sqrt(OBI)*2.5 = CRI, with the GCB/OBI weighted 75-25.
4. For countries with only GCB. (10-sqrt(GCB))*10, with the GCB being the only weight by definition.

Needless to say, the accuracy of any CRI score increases with the amount of data it is based on.

I did not bother including any country that doesn’t have polling data on the prevalence of bribery over the past year, as it is an indispensable indicator. One can only hope that the Global Corruption Barometer will expand its coverage in the coming years, as the CRI depends so much on its data.

One major group of countries that isn’t assessed here, because of a lack of data, are the Gulf monarchies. If we make the (rather generous?) assumption than only 5% of their households pay a bribe in any given year, then based on the UAE’s and Kuwait’s Global Integrity scores and Saudi Arabia’s OBI, these countries will have the following CRI: Kuwait (6.2), UAE (6.7), Saudi Arabia (4.0).

This is but the beginning. I hope to search out more sources of data like the GCB, and keep expanding the Corruption Realities Index in the years ahead.

EDIT 05/26/2011: Note that there are going to be substantial internal variations for corruption within a country, as different regions will have varyingly corrupt bureaucracies and police forces. To take the example of Russia, for instance, a recent FOM poll indicates that the frequency of requests for bribes ranged from, say, 7% in Omsk oblast, to 31% in St.-Petersburg. This would translate into CRI scores of 7.3 and 5.9, respectively.

Politics & Democracy

In the US, there are two main parties that form a “bipartisan consensus” on most of the truly important topics. Both parties are beholden to corporate interests (Democrats more Wall Street; Republicans more Big Oil). Obama’s foreign policy is no real change from that of the later Bush administration. The political and mass media establishment is more than happy to criticize foreign countries for human rights abuses, real or perceived – especially those they dislike, like Russia or Venezuela – while similar or identical things happen in the US itself. A good example is the criticism towards the breakup of unsanctioned Russian political protests, which have exact parallels in the US; just as I was writing this post, 100 antiwar activists and 35 Bradley Manning supporters were arrested.

(The double standards thing is every bit as prevalent in the UK too, by the way. For a good summary see this article by Mark Sleboda.)

There is a strong “culture war” element to US politics, with a strong liberal vs. conservative struggle on hot issues such as global warming, the power of unions, gun rights and abortion. The US also has far more direct democracy at the state level than either the UK, not to mention Russia. For instance, when California needs to decide whether to decriminalize marijuana or gay marriage, it consults the voters; in most of the rest of the world, the decision is left to unelected “experts”.

Though it has three major parties, the sphere of political opinion is even narrower in the UK than in the US. On most issues, the Tories/Lib Dems and Labour can all be arraigned within the confines of the Democratic Party. There is, at least, a real difference in views on social rights (e.g. abortion; environmental protection; etc) between the Democrats and Republicans, whereas it is hard to distinguish even these differences between New Labour and the Conservatives. Effectively fringe movements, like the Green Party or the nationalist BNP, have slightly more formal political power than in the US through their own parties. Such pressure movements in both the US (e.g. the Tea Party) and Russia (e.g. the DPNI; greens; liberals) tend to exert political influence through the Establishment (respectively, the two-party system and the Kremlin).

The political consensus in Russia is represented by the Kremlin (with its tightly interlinked political, security and oligarchic elites) and its “party of power” (United Russia). But in contrast to the USSR, modern Russia has no real ideology beyond the national interest and vague allusions to its Great Power traditions (derzhavnost’). Its political economy is a melange of traditional Muscovite patrimonialism, Gaullist statism, and even libertarian elements like the flat tax. Its political space is much wider than in the Anglosphere, ranging from right-wing liberals to the (unreformed) Communist Party; but this is of little account, since the old ideological struggles, e.g. the Slavophiles vs. the Westernizers (Tsarism), or the Communists vs. the liberals (1990′s), are now over. The current system is best characterized as a Kremlin-moderated debate, carried on between different personalities and factions, about how to best modernize Russia, and the pace and extent of liberalization.

Igor Sechin, Deputy PM, is commonly regarded as the leader or spokesperson of the siloviki.

The two major factions, or “Kremlin clans“, are the siloviki and the civiliki. The siloviki, or “power people”, are typically men drawn from the security agencies – primarily the FSB and Interior Ministry – whose fortunes rose with the ascension of Putin to power. Their unofficial leader is Igor Sechin. The civiliki are composed of economically-liberal economists, lawyers and technocrats, as well as the Anti-Narcotics Agency and GRU military intelligence, who form a loose coalition around Dmitry Medvedev, the current President. There is also a third grouping who owe allegiance directly to Putin, most prominently Vladislav Surkov, who is the chief ideologue (e.g. inventing the term “sovereign democracy”).

Though Putin’s position as PM is formally weaker than the President’s, this is counterbalanced by his leadership of the party of power, United Russia. Some analysts regard Putin as the most powerful man in Russia, with Medvedev a distant second, third after Sechin, or even a puppet. I think that each member of the ruling “tandem” has about equal power, with Sechin a distant third. It is certainly a mistake to see the dispute between the two factions – to the extent that one exists, as there is also a lot of cooperation – as a kind of struggle between democracy / transparency / markets vs. authoritarianism / corruption / statism. The relations between these “clans” are largely symbiotic, not confrontational.

Garry Kasparov, leading Russian liberal, meeting with Georgian President Saakashvili, after Russia fought a war with him in 2008. I'm sure things like this do wonders for the liberals' popularity.

One common but totally misguided characterization of Russian politics is that of an authoritarian Kremlin (brutally) suppressing the liberal opposition. Only in their own fantasies. The liberals’ proud association with the 1990′s and its accouterments (e.g. mass impoverishment under the liberal reforms; criminal oligarchs; etc), lack of constructive solutions (their slogans are pretty much limited to “Putin Must Go!” and variations thereof) and worshipful adulation of everything “European” or “Western” as “civilized” (as opposed to attacks on Russia, or “Rashka” as they like to call it, as irredeemably corrupt and barbaric) filters down their support base to about 5% of the population. (Though that doesn’t stop them from presenting themselves as the genuine voice of the Russian people, especially to credulous Western journalists). There’s no FSB bogeymen or Kremlin “web brigades” marginalizing the Russian liberals; they do it well enough by themselves.

It should also be stressed that the real opposition, to the extent that one exists, aren’t the aforementioned liberals but the Communists. The former have the support of 5% of the population; the latter have the support of 25%. Main problem is that pensioners marching with red flags aren’t quite as photogenic and chic to Western journalists as the airbrushed representatives of the liberal movements.

For a fuller explanation, I highly recommend these articles: A Short Overview of Russian Political Discourse (“kovane”); On The Politics Of Russia (Alexandre Latsa); The Kremlinologist Catechism (yours truly).

For “political freedom indices”, most of which (e.g. Freedom House) aren’t worth the bandwidth they take up, I think the Polity IV is the most accurate. (Not to mention my own Karlin Freedom Index).

Myth: Russia Is A Dictatorship

The "Russian dictator" Vladimir Putin.

Several times in the US, I’ve been asked what I think of the “Russian dictator Vladimir Putin”. I don’t like getting into old arguments, so my usual response is a demurral that I’m not interested in politics. But in reality the very question is pretty laughable to me. The Internet is completely uncensored. There are many articles in the major newspapers that are deeply critical of the government, and two major media outlets are run by the liberals who do little else (Novaya Gazeta & Echo of Moscow; the latter, by the way, is owned by state company Gazprom). You can complain, shout or publish pretty much anything you want about how corrupt, tyrannical or treasonous Russia’s leaders are (and it’s not just the liberals who do it; nationalist / far-right rhetoric is even more hysterical, flaying the Kremlin for selling out Russia by allowing in dark-skinned Gastarbeiters). This is not to say that the Russian government never abuses the rights of its citizens or acts in stupid and/or counterproductive ways against these “dissidents”; you can find dozens of examples of this, such as the deaths in pre-trial detention of a lawyer investigating police corruption or the police confiscating copies of Boris Nemtsov’s screed against the the “Putin regime”. But if occasional corrupt and ham-fisted actions like this made Russia an authoritarian dictatorship it would have virtually every other country in the world for company.

The US also has its “dissidents”, ranging from the edges of the Establishment (e.g. Ron Paul, James Hansen) to complete outsiders (e.g. anti-globalization; antiwar; anarchist). But it hardly makes the front page news in the US when they’re put on “domestic terrorist” watch lists, their houses are raided, or their protests broken up. Generally speaking, you can only find out about that kind of stuff on alternate news media and the exceedingly rich American blogosphere.

A Quick Note On Putin Himself

The current PM has managed to maintain an approval rating of 70%+ for the past decade, which is almost unheard of for a leader in the UK or the US. Some argue that it’s because the state media creates a cult around him (some liberals refer to his young supporters as Putlerjugend), others because of some ingrained Russian yearning for a “strong hand”. Largely, I think he’s popular because he’s essentially a moderate conservative who is associated with uncontroversial values such as stability, patriotism, and rising incomes; the theory about government propaganda creating Putinoid drones is undermines by the fact that he is as popular amongst the young and university-educated (i.e. they have Internet access and many know English) as he is amongst pensioners (i.e. who generally rely on TV for news). But my favorite explanation is the one offered by Cracked: that he’s the craziest badass!

Socialism and Markets

Many Americans and British are concerned, even disturbed, by the reemergence of the Russian state as a central player in society and the economy. But this is to project British and American mentalities, in which the state has traditionally played a subsidiary role, to Russia, whose experience has been entirely different: a state (gosudarstvo) that has always been at the forefront of modernization; and a state that has guaranteed Russia’s security against numerous invaders down the centuries (whereas the US and Britain haven’t been successfully invaded since 1066, and whose citizens have come to view their own states as potentially the greatest threat to their rights and liberties).

But not only are Russians accustomed to viewing their state as having a far greater and more central role than in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but they also underwent a far deeper collapse in state power than experienced in either the US or the UK for at least the past century; during the 1990′s, the salaries of state workers went unpaid for months, and elementary state prerogatives such as the monopoly on violence and on money creation slipped out of its control. After such travails, no doubt the Americans and British too would have pined for the return of a strong state*.

* I found a poll a few days ago that pretty much confirms this. In the wake of the economic crash and bank bailouts, the percentage of Americans believing in the free market economy as the best system fell to 59% by 2010 (from 71% in 2005), compared with 55% of Britons (from 66%) and 52% of Russians (up from 43%). It’s telling that after just three years of economic turmoil, Americans are barely more pro-free market than Russians who lived through 70 years of socialism, followed by a decade of hyper-depression and a decade of pretty fast growth under a market economy.

Politics is rarely a topic for conversation in the US or Britain, unless its on Facebook, and the number of ideological positions one can “respectably” take is far more circumscribed than in Russia. For instance, it is perfectly acceptable to call oneself a Communist or a Marxist; not surprising, since 15-20% of the population votes for them. Doing so in the UK will not endear you to polite society, while in the US it is hurled around as a term of abuse in political discourse. Actually admitting to being a socialist, let alone a Communist, will get you shunned in most American circles. It’s pretty hilarious to see the Republicans painting Obama as a radical leftist, when in much of Europe he’d be regarded as a corporatist centrist.

The Weird Ideological Alliance Between Far Right Republicans And Russian Liberals

There is a surprisingly strong affinity between the Tea Party and Russia’s liberals, the main exception being that the former are far more mainstream. Some 28% of US adults call themselves supporters of the Tea Party movement, whereas Russia’s liberals have at most 5% (being generous). Both dislike big government, have 19th century conceptions of what liberalism is about (emphasizing free enterprise, private property, etc). Illarionov, the libertarian economist who fell out with Putin, is also a Tea Partier and has protested in the US against Obama’s healthcare reforms and condemned the Kyoto Protocols. Another prominent Russian liberal, Latynina, believes global warming is a scam to enrich or empower “the global bureaucracy” and supports disenfranchising poor Russians. Yet another, Novodvorskaya, supports Westerners bombing undemocratic and uncivilized Third World countries. No wonder, then, that Russian “liberals” find so much common cause with the nuttier elements of the Republican Party.

Why do these rightist views have much bigger support in the US? Quite simply, the majority of Russians – about 70% of them, according to opinion polls – are essentially statists, who believe the state has a duty to extensively interfere in the economy to protect the weak and assure everyone a safety net. That is similar to attitudes in Europe. The US, in contrast, has a starkly different political culture that has traditionally stressed values such as self-reliance, asperity, the “self-made man”, the “free enterprise system”, etc; which don’t work, at least nowadays, nearly as well as the rhetoric of their proponents. One consequence of this is that there is a far greater degree of “false consciousness” in the US than in Russia.

Oligarchs

Glaring divisions of wealth are far more evident in Russia and America. Whereas the UK has 33 billionaires for 61 million people, Russia has 101 billionaires for 143 million and the US has 412 billionaires for 308 million people.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is a veritable superstar among hip American youth.

Furthermore, whereas the British affluent stress Weberian values of keeping a low and modest profile, many American billionaires enjoy a cult-like status (Bill Gates; Warren Buffet; Steve Jobs…) and Russian oligarchs flaunt their wealth with absolute abandon.

This makes some Russians bitter, since most of the Russian billionaires obtained their assets in the anarchic 1990′s through shady, dubious, and semi-legal (at best) ways; in contrast, US billionaires are either self-made or inherited their wealth. However, the more common sentiment amongst younger people isn’t so much hatred or envy but a desire to emulate them (what that says about their values I’ll leave to you).

One factor that probably diminishes Russians’ ill feeling about the wealth of the oligarchs is that – to a far greater extent than in the West – they are now firmly under the Kremlin’s thumb. Their property rights aren’t secure, as in the West; instead, they are conditional on their political loyalty and their help in maintaining social stability. E.g.,

• Roman Abramovich funded infrastructure and social services as governor of the remote region of Chukotka from out of his own pocket.
• Viktor Vekselberg repatriated imperial-era art objects, including luxury Fabergé eggs – created for the Tsars and taken out of the country after the Revolution – and loaned them to Russian state museums.
• They are expected to maintain employment rates and pay wages on time, even if it’s unprofitable for them. When Oleg Deripaska failed to do so in Pikalyovo, he was publicly chastised by Putin, after which he promptly reversed course.
• A consortium of oligarchs provides financing for flagship Kremlin projects such as the 2014 Sochi Olympics and the Skolkovo technology center.

In return for these services, Russia’s oligarchs get to keep and profit from their assets. The Russian state is also generous about providing them help with penetrating foreign markets, on the many occasions when oligarch economic interests coincide with the Kremlin’s foreign policy interest, e.g. acquiring steel mills in Ukraine, or stakes in West European energy companies. This system is, in some circles, called “Kremlin, Inc”.

The American model of billionaire-political interaction is much more one-sided; basically, whereas the oligarchic elites have in Russia have decisively come under the heel of the political and security elites since 2003*, the political system in the US has come to be extremely influenced by the billionaire class – especially after the Citizens United judicial decision that removed limits to corporate funding of political of political campaign. The Koch brothers’ bankrolling of the Tea Party movement and war against social rights and environmental protections is only the tip of the iceberg.

* The symbolic occasion was the arrest and imprisonment of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest oligarch at the time. Formally, the charges were tax evasion; in actuality, it was for using his wealth to manipulate the political process, such as funding opposition parties and buying out parliamentary deputies to lobby for lower taxes on the oil industry.

Patriotism & Nationalism

Political correctness is far more developed in the US and Britain than it is in Russia; if you hate immigrants or think women should stay in the kitchen, you’d be best off keeping it to yourself when in ordinary company. In contrast, Russians have no problems mouthing off shockingly racist comments about dark-skinned people (“black-asses”) or telling you that the country is degenerating and needs another Stalin*. However, I don’t think this indicates that Russians are backwards so much as that Westerners are more practiced at concealing their true feelings. If you want proof, one need look no further than the anonymous comments sections on sites like FOX News or The Telegraph; they are full of Islamophobia (and Russophobia, Sinophobia, etc.), anti-immigrant sentiment, war-mongering, paeans to the superiority of Western culture, etc.

* For whatever reason, every single Russian taxi driver I’ve ever hitched a ride with happened to be a hardline Stalinist.

There is a high level of civilizational nationalism in the US: the flag is omnipresent, in the conservative states elementary school students recite the Pledge of Allegiance every morning, politicians and pundits go on about how ”exceptional” the US is and why it should exercise ”global leadership.” Though it sounds quaint at best to Europeans – including the British who let go of messianic complexes by the 1960′s and the Russians by the 1990′s* - the fact is that many Americans truly believe in this vision of the US as a “city on the hill” with a civilizing global mission. While the official rhetoric about “freedom promotion” and “democracy building” mostly elicits cynical smirks from the politicos in the End Of History-type places like the Bay Area, it is treated with the appropriate gravitas in Middle America.

* To summarize: The British had an empire; the Russians miss their empire; the Americans run an empire, but don’t want to admit it.

Famous photo of Red Army soldier hoisting the Soviet flag over Berlin. (The US equivalent has American GI's raising the flag on Iwo Jima).

Russian patriotism is based on appreciation of its culture, values, and a shared history that reaches its apogee in the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). The shared sacrifices incurred in that struggle – 27 million dead in the USSR, including 13 million Russians – for survival bind together not only Russian citizens, but all the peoples of the former Soviet Union. The Kremlin has encouraged its emergence as the primary national myth consolidating the modern Russian nation-state.

Arguably, Russian patriotism tends to be less bombastic and immediately visible than in America, but is every bit as deep-seated; certainly the Russian flag is nowhere near as omnipresent as in the US (though more so than in the UK or Germany). British patriotism is as real as Russian or American, but tends to be more low-key and even self-deprecatory.

It is hard to deny that the pageantry of the Russian state – as in its anthems, songs, marches, flags, symbols, monumental architecture – is some of the deepest and most moving and inspiring in the world. E.g. see this video of the 1945 Victory March in Moscow.

Ethnic based nationalism is an extremely fringe movement in the US, despite sites like Stormfront and books like The Turner Diaries. It has a far more visible presence in Russia, where skinhead gangs make parts of some cities unsafe for people with the wrong skin color, especially after events like football matches*. Though the gangs themselves number no more than a few tens of thousands, the slogan of “Russia for [ethnic] Russians” is approved by nearly half the population.

* It is common for supporters of rival football clubs to duke it out at set times and places on Russian streets. The police keep a watch on these brawls, but don’t interfere as long as they doesn’t spiral out of control. I heard that some decades ago there used to be similar scenes in Britain, but nowadays the police take a far harder line against football hooliganism.

Party Systems

One of the great strengths of the two party system in the US is that whenever one of its halves loses legitimacy (as indicated by elections), the other half takes over and starts out with a clean slate. But members of both parties are drawn from the ranks of the same power elite that never loses its standing in this system of dynamic equilibrium. There is a similar dynamic in Britain, although it has 2.5 major parties; their “first past the post” electoral system prevents small parties from playing any significant role, as is common in Europe.

In contrast, the current Russian arrangement is metastable, i.e. in a delicate equilibrium that is maintained by popular approval for the Kremlin and its leading personalities. The Kremlin may resolve this long-term stability problem by encouraging a genuinely competitive politics, e.g. by splitting United Russia into conservative (merge with LPDR) and social democratic (merge with Fair Russia) wings. But as it currently stands, if its political legitimacy were to fade away, e.g. if economic stagnation sets in, then the consequences may be unpredictable.

The Media

The UK print media is dominated by The Guardian (liberal left; pro-Labour; readers nicknamed “Guardianistas” by right wingers); The Daily Telegraph (right conservative; pro-Conservative); The Independent (very liberal, left; vaguely pro-Liberal Democrat); the centrist Times; The Financial Times (The City’s paper); and the tabloids The Sun (right populist) and The Daily Mail (centrist populist; nicknamed ”The Daily Fail” by critics). The most important magazine is The Economist, whose most valuable service, IMO, is not the spread of good information or analysis – they follow a blatantly pro-Western, pro-free markets line and try to force everything into that narrow narrative - but the provision of good insights into the mentalities of the political/financial Anglo-Saxon elites. My favorite British paper is The Independent (you can comment on almost every article) and The Guardian (its investigative journalism is unparalleled); but in fairness, The Telegraph and even The Daily Mail have interesting stuff. Certainly, British conservatives are far more reasoned than their American counterparts. I also used to like The Times, but haven’t checked back since they raised a paywall.

On TV, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) pretends to be neutral and editorially independent, but that’s not the case now if it ever was; back in 2004, its head was sacked for alleging – not without cause – that the government “sexed up” the case for the Iraq War. The rot has only festered since. What makes this particularly annoying is that to watch TV at all in the UK, you have to pay a tax specifically for the upkeep of the BBC, even if you have no intention of ever watching it. The most interesting and controversial voices tend to appear on Channel 4.

Stratfor produces concise analysis on major issues of the day, supported by detailed research.

In the US, the two major papers are The New York Times (centrist, largely pro-Democrat; nicknamed “The Gray Lady” and regarded as the paper of record), The Washington Post (centrist), The Wall Street Journal (right-wing paper of the financial/business class), The Washington Times (neocon jerks), The Christian Science Monitor (intelligent centrist), The LA Times (pretty good), the San Francisco Chronicle, etc. My favorites are the NYT, WaPo, and CSM.

The US also has a huge variety of high-quality journals dedicated to specific issues or opinion, e.g. Foreign Affairs, Salon, The Atlantic, The Nation, The National Interest, etc. Of particular note is STRATFOR. Its best feature is that it does not, like the mass media, try to fit events into some ideologized narrative, e.g. by peddling myths such as that the reason France or the US got involved in Libya is because of human rights or democracy. Instead, its combination of good intelligence, focus on geopolitics and realism, and disavowal of ideology enables excellent analysis. Tje subscription fee isn’t cheap but well worth the money.

I’ve never bothered to get a TV in the US, but from the stuff I’ve seen, it was a good decision. Ads are long and news coverage is juvenile and more slanted than in the UK (let alone Europe).

Though a great deal is made of the US media being privately owned, and therefore editorially independent, there is no such connection; to the contrary, being reliant on advertising revenue, private media has to cater to popular stereotypes (by reducing everything to simplistic, good vs. evil narratives) and to maintain good relations with the government (to get the approved leaks and inside sources that make news stories; plus, the media’s parent companies sometimes generate some of their revenue from contractual relations with the government itself). Even the NYT, the most highly regarded US newspaper, has on numerous occasions acted to conceal information deemed embarrassing to the government (and not a threat to national security, as claimed). The simple fact is that where the state does not set the editorial line (e.g. the BBC; most of Russian TV), journalists tend to self-censor themselves anyway.

PS. Here I should make an important semantic note. Whereas “liberal” tends to mean leftist in the US (often with social liberal connotations), and to mean a social liberal in the UK and Europe (for instance, the Liberal Democrats are more socially liberal than New Labour; but they are further to the right economically), in Russia it tends to imply right-wing economics and pro-Western orientations. The opposite of liberal, in the Russian political discourse, is “patriot”, and typically has leftist and pro-Russian/pro-Eurasian connotations.

The Russian print media is dominated by Komsomolskaya Pravda (leftist); Vedomosti (liberal right; features good coverage of political and/or corruption scandals); Kommersant (centrist, financial); Argumenty i Fakty (left-patriotic); Izvestia (centrist-patriotic); Nezavisimaya Gazeta (liberal left); Novaya Gazeta (very liberal; the voice of the liberal intelligentsia); Trud (very leftist; the voice of the Communists); Rossiyskaya Gazeta (responsible for publishing new laws, official paper of record). Also of note is Lenta.Ru, an Internet-based publication. Then there’s the infamous Pravda, which is tabloid trash and, contrary to popular opinion, has nothing to do with the old Soviet paper of the same name. My favorite papers are Kommersant, Argumenty i Fakty, and Vedomosti.

This is a gross generalization, but my impression is that (serious) Russian newspapers tend to have more details on global events than major Western ones; they are certainly far better at giving both sides of the story when it involves the West vs. Someone Else. For instance, in contrast to the good guys vs. bad guys narrative spun by most US/UK newspapers on Libya, the Russians were far earlier and more insistent on raising uncomfortable questions, such as: Are the rebels truly more human rights-respecting than Gaddafi? Do they actually have more popular support? Are they militarily competent, and if not, might a ground intervention not become necessary? What about their ties to radical Islamists? Is NATO’s goal to provide civilian protection, as allowed by UN resolution, or regime change? The only major Western publications that are as probing and skeptical on these issues as the likes of Kommersant or Lenta.Ru that come to mind are STRATFOR and Spiegel.

Russia’s TV channels are, pretty explicitly, pro-government (though unlike British (BBC) or American ones (FOX News – “fair and balanced”) they don’t bother making claims to impartiality). The main independent broadcast media are Ren TV (which airs controversial documentaries and prominently features opposition liberals and socialists) and the Echo of Moscow radio station.

I can’t really comment in any detail on the differences between Russian, British, and American TV because I haven’t watched the box in many years.

Western news channels unleashed a barrage of propaganda during the South Ossetian War, portraying it as an unprovoked Russian invasion of free democratic Georgia.

Whereas many Western political scientists make a big deal of the division between the “free” US (UK, etc) press and the “controlled” Russian press, I’m hard-pressed to spot a difference. When the Western political elites are united on a particular goal (e.g. the months leading up to the Iraq War in the US), then their broadcast media follows in step; plurality only appears when the elites divide (e.g. in the aftermath of that same Iraq War, when prominent politicians began to question the wisdom of the adventure).

The best demonstration of the myth that Western media is in any way exceptional lies in its coverage of the 2008 South Ossetia War, in which the uniform line was that Russia was the aggressor against Georgia. The inconvenient facts that it was the Georgians who had started the war by shelling the Ossetian city of Tskhinvali and the Russian peacekeepers guarding it remained unknown and unaired to viewers of the mainstream media throughout the war. CNN presented pictures of Georgian destruction in Tskhinvali as Russian destruction of the Georgian town of Gori. Of course, the Russians too were actively involved in this “information war”. As this Wikipedia article makes clear, both Western and Russian journalists where driven not by the search for truth but by the agendas of their editors, bosses and political handlers back home.

Russia has what its fans call a “dissident press”; small publications, typically liberal or socialist, online (e.g. the liberal Ezhednevny Zhurnal, whose denizens are called “ezhiki”, or hedgehogs; and Left.Ru for socialists).  The US has them too, where they are called the alternate media; examples include The Daily Cos, Alternet, Antiwar, Counterpunch, Exiled Online, and they are usually populated by leftists, anarchists, and libertarians.

Russia Today's real sin is that it asks uncomfortable questions that others are too afraid to ask.

Interestingly, Russia Today – the English-language broadcasting arm of the Russian state (who main political analyst Peter Lavelle I interviewed here), which is criticized for spreading anti-American propaganda by some and defended as encouraging Westerners to “question more” by others, is favorably cited by the aforementioned US dissidents. Their mirror image are the Russian dissidents who tune in to Radio Liberty / Radio Free Europe or Voice of America, which mainstream Russian politicians dismiss as propaganda channels seeking to undermine Russia. The symmetry is amusing to say the least.

While Russia Today is critical of many US policies, especially foreign policy, if you were to call it “anti-Western”, then you’d have to call the vast majority of Western media outlets “Russophobic” for consistency. For instance, it is one of the very few media outlets that covers US antiwar protests, e.g. at Fort Benning where several RT journalists were arrested. Similarly, Western media outlets devote a lot of attention to Russian liberal protests (but not Communist, anarchist, etc.) than Russian journalists.

Unauthorized protests in the West get broken up too, you know...

That said… American journalists are still far, far better at covering the US than the Russian journalists digging around for horror stories of American healthcare; just as Russian journalists are far better at covering Russia than British or American journalists on two year assignments in Moscow who may not even know the language and believe that liberal protests are the cutting edge of Russian political life.

(PS. One important point on which the symmetry breaks down is that whereas the Western media frequently claims that the Russian media is controlled, the reverse practically never happens. For instance, in the lead-up to the Wikileaks Cablegate, The Christian Science Monitor patronizingly wrote:

WikiLeaks ready to drop a bombshell on Russia. But will Russians get to read about it? WikiLeaks is about to release documents on Russia, but the tightly-controlled Russian media is unlikely to report them the way Western media attacked the documents about Afghanistan and Iraq.

Which is of course why state news agency RIA and Kommersant both reported it on the same day! Not to mention that describing the Western media’s (largely negative) response to Wikileaks in such glowing terms can only be ironic…

And this is one example from literally thousands. Again, I can’t be emphasize just how annoyingly repetitive and willfully ignorant the Western media tends to be on their Russian counterparts).

Right-wing political analysts in the US and Russia like to predict each other’s collapse. For instance, in its global forecasts, the CIA has repeatedly predicted the breakup of the Russian Federation into its constituent ethnic parts and demographic takeover by Muslims within the next few decades. Meanwhile, some analysts linked to Russia’s intelligence community, such as Igor Panarin, have predicted the breakup of the US, and the annexation of its southern borderlands by Mexico. Needless to say, they should all be writing sci-fi novels.

The final three Russian publications of note are RIA Novosti (a state-owned international news agency but liberal leaning); The Moscow Times (an independent publication for Western expats in Russia that is full of liberal sensationalism); and Inosmi (a site that translates Western news items, mostly about Russia, into Russian for a patriot-leaning audience that then proceeds to discuss them or mock them).

Both Russia and especially the US have rich blogospheres, which are in some cases threatening to supplant the centuries-old dominance of the mainstream media altogether.

Internet Culture

Internet penetration is near universal in the US and the UK. It is also near universal amongst younger Russians, although this has only come about in the last few years. The fastest Internet is on the East Coast, followed by the West Coast including California, followed by the UK, followed by Russia. Stuff like Internet businesses and Internet shopping remains the most developed in the US, less developed in the UK, and far less developed (but growing very fast) in Russia. Also, it is typical for cafes and other public places to have access to Wifi in the US; this is still very rare in both the UK and Russia.

Americans are an opinionated people, hence the richness, variety and zaniness of its blogosphere. Every Joe wants a say. While the majority aren’t worth listening to, nonetheless, practically every subject under the sun has at least one very knowledgeable pundit plugging away at the keyboard: North Korea watchers; Arctic aficionados; Afghan tribe trackers; peak oil theorists; etc. The most fascinating fact is that many of these people don’t even work in universities, think-tanks, governments, corporate research, etc.; they are amateur enthusiasts whose works blow away those of the self-proclaimed experts.

Another aspect of the American blogosphere is that at its heights, it has begun to merge into the mainstream and traditional media. For instance, at the pinnacle, it is unclear whether The Huffington Post is even a blog or a news site. Like the American body politic, the blogosphere is rife with “culture wars”; some of the biggest battalions marshal at the blog of Matt Yglesias (the liberals) and Michelle Malkin (the conservatives). Generally, I think there are far more conservatives at the nuttier ends of the spectrum than liberals, though certainly there are also many liberals who veer from well-meaning criticism of US policies to Americanophobia. Other wars and sub-wars carry on in the dark depths of cyberspace. I’m well acquainted with three.

The “Russophiles” vs. “Russophobes” (encountered when I first started blogging, though fortunately in more recent years the Russia debate has largely transcended these simplistic categories). The “deniers” vs. “warmists” is a huge war between those who accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming and those who deny it. And the “doomers” vs. the “cornucopians”, which I encountered when I took an interest in concepts like peak oil and the technological singularity; roughly, the former think civilization will soon collapse and we’ll die out, while the latter believe – just as absurdly – that the Earth can sustain unlimited (economic, demographic, etc.) growth.

A putztriot's dream.

The main culture war in Russia is fought on multiple fronts (as opposed to liberals vs. conservatives in the US). You have the “patriots” (generally like Putin; skeptical towards Western intentions; sometimes steer into nationalism; called “putztriots” by their liberal detractors); the liberals (most love the West, and especially the US, unconditionally; blind hatred of Putin; accused of sucking up to the West; are called “liberasts” or by their patriot detractors, and are said to belong to “demschiza“, i.e. pseudo-democratic schizophrenics); the Communists (love socialism, and frequently Stalin; nostalgia for USSR; many dislike Putin regime for tolerating oligarchs and parasites; called “kommunyaks” and “sovoks” by liberals and some patriots); the foshists (the fascists – liberals tend to think patriots are all fascists, and at times the line can be blurry; nonetheless, there are real and significant differences, namely that patriots aren’t racist, while fascists hate the Putin regime for allowing Russia to be “polluted” by Jews, Caucasians, etc.); and Kremlin supporters (called the “kremlyad” and “Putinoids” by detractors; most often by liberals and fascists, but anti-Kremlin patriots and Communists have been known to use it too).

All groups criticize dermoktariya (lit., “shit democracy”), but it means different things for everyone. For Kremlin supporters and most patriots, it primarily refers to the perceived sham democracy of the 1990′s (as opposed to the “sovereign democracy” of today); for liberals, it refers to the current system (as opposed to the 1990′s Golden Age of freedom); for many Communists, it refers to the post-Soviet system in general; and the fascists equate all democracy with dermoktariya.

Across the entirety of “Runet”, i.e. the Russian Internet, I would estimate that of the politically inclined: 50% are patriots; 30% are Kremlin supporters; 20% are Communists; 20% are liberals; 10% are fascists. These groups overlap extensively (see below).

A liberast's dream.

The most loathed group are the radical liberals, the ones who hate Russia; faced by them, the patriots, Communists and Kremlin supporters tend to unite to suppress them on the political message boards or LiveJournal blogs. But frequently, a patriot or a Communist would mock a Kremlin supporter, because, say, the former doesn’t like the Kremlin’s corruption or perceived tolerance for illegal immigration, and the latter doesn’t like inequality, corruption, crime, etc., and all the other things they think were better in the good old Soviet days. Interestingly, your typical patriot and Communist is actually more anti-Western than the straight-laced Kremlin supporters.

Eddie Limonov: "We will need children from the new people... Permit polygamy, free associations. Women should get pregnant continuously and to bear fruits... Education will become short and will be different. Boys and girls will be taught to shoot from grenade throwers, to jump from helicopters, to besiege villages and cities, to skin sheep and pigs, to cook good hot food and to write poetry."

There is also a lot of overlap between groups. Most patriots, and many Communists, and even a few liberals, do actually support the Kremlin (note that the Kremlin itself is divided between “patriots”, and the patriot-liberals clustered around President Medvedev). Other, more marginalized, chimeras include liberal nationalists (pro-Western, but with ethnic Russian nationalist leanings; the most prominent such is Alexei Navalny, mentioned in the first part of this series); Communists with liberal leanings, who would be social democrats or greens in Europe; and nationalist Communists, such as the wacky National Bolsheviks (their leader, Eduard Limonov, is an especially colorful character: a playboy émigré who returned to Russia in the 1990′s to preach a weird synthesis of Nazism and Stalinism, he was imprisoned for plotting a revolution in Kazakhstan; since then, he has joined forces with the liberals against the Kremlin, which is ironic to say the least since those same liberals would be first up against the wall in the fantastical scenario that the NatsBols ever come to power).

Throughout the blogosphere, these culture wars are characterized by rudeness, extremism, censorship, etc., on all sides, including those who call themselves liberals or democrats and pretend to worship free speech. Fun anecdote: the Russian liberals frequently accused their opponents of using “web brigades” – bands of Kremlin-paid commentators posting under changing usernames – to defeat them on Internet discussions. So unfair! So what do some of them decide to do? They created web brigades of their own to attack the “bloody regime” and its defenders! That is, until the plot was revealed by a disillusioned insider. While this liberal web brigade operated, it succeeded at influencing the outcomes of practically zero discussions. Ironically, their greatest victory was to prove the infeasbility and uselessness of “web brigades” – be they liberal, Kremlin, or Martian – in the first place.

To a large extent, the British blogosphere is tied up with the American one, due to the common language.

The Anglo-Saxon blogosphere mostly uses blog platforms like WordPress (excellent) and Google Blogger (mediocre). Most Russians use LiveJournal – which is far more profiteering, restrictive, and generally crappy – for no good reason I can see.

Google dominates search engines in both the US and the UK. In Russia, a viable competitor to Google (in its own country, not abroad) has emerged in the form of Yandex. The premier online shopping hub in the US and UK is Amazon; in Russia, it is Ozon. The social network of choice for the British and American middle class is Facebook (the best network). The lower classes use MySpace (pretty crappy), though many of them have began migrating to Facebook in recent years. The Russia network of choice used to be Odnoklassniki (which is pretty crappy), but the more advanced elements have switched to Vkontakte (a substandard copy of Facebook, even down to the color scheme); however, Facebook is growing very fast, albeit from a very low base. Twitter remains largely dominated by Americans.

Corruption

One common stereotype is that Russia is much more corrupt than the US or the UK. This is true for small scale corruption. Slipping in a bill – or a bottle of cognac for male, a box of chocolates for female bureaucrats – will tend to enhance your chances of getting a driving license, getting documents processed faster, having a ticket written off by the traffic policeman, etc. That said, corruption is certainly far from ubiquitous and it is almost always possible to have everything go through legal channels. The small scale corruption is now in retreat, as bureaucrats are becoming subject to more stringent checks and controls; the result is that with increased risk, the size of the average bribe has nearly doubled in the last few years. According to various opinion polls, 15% of Russians say they paid a bribe in the past year, compared to about 2% of both Britons and Americans.

In my view, the main reason that lower-level corruption is far more prevalent in Russia than in the developed West is that the cost/benefits are more skewed in corruption’s favor, due to lower salaries, far more red tape, and weaker anti-corruption mechanisms. For instance, no California policeman is going to risk his cushy, full-benefits, $60,000 job even for big bribes from motorists. Consequently, as a rule, mostly it is billionaires or very rich people who can enjoy the benefits of corruption in the US or Britain, e.g. the billionaire pedophile / sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein who got a one year home arrest (and free to leave for work 16 hours per day!) for what would usually be a 20 year mandatory minimum sentence. In Russia, similar privileges are available for mere millionaires and regional political bigwigs, e.g. Ludmila Shavenkova, daughter of a United Russia deputy in Irkutsk guilty of vehicular manslaughter, got a 2.5 year sentence but only due to start in 14 years – by which time she would most likely have been quietly acquitted… And even that symbolic sentence was only imposed after a big citizen outcry.

I used to believe that corruption at the higher levels of government and business was also far more prevalent in Russia, but the financial crisis – and the cozy ties between regulators, banks and politicians that it revealed, and the $100′s billions that well-connected financial institutions received in bailouts from the US and UK governments – has made me reconsider. While there can be little doubt that Russian elites sock away a lot of money to offshore havens – e.g., state pipeline operator Transneft was recently discovered (by Navalny) to have socked away $4 billion through an elaborate network of shell companies and offshore havens - at least they do it far more discretely now than in the 1990′s, when the graft was visibly, even proudly, in the open.

In stark contrast, the rot at the heart of the Western economies has become increasingly evident since 2008 and the bailouts, which unleashed a cascade of corruption in which trillions of dollars of free credit were unaccountably transferred from American taxpayers to rich individuals and corporations, which in turn lent the money back to the government at (higher) market rates. The difference is the billionaires’ subsidy. As in Russia, most of what we know of corruption at the highest levels comes not from the traditional media, which is beholden to the power elites, but investigative reporters working for smaller “alternate” publications, such as Matt Taibbi for Rolling Stone. Similar financial shenanigans have also become prevalent in the UK.

One major difference between corruption in Russia and the US is that in the latter, much of it is “legalized corruption”; i.e., what would count as corruption in Russia (and in European countries in general) goes as a matter of course in the US. Some examples of this “legalized corruption”:

• Politicians receive the bulk of their money from corporations. Lobbying is not only a legal but an integral part of US political life. Corporations enjoy individual rights, such as freedom of speech (though not so much their detractors, who can be sued for libel), and under the Obama Presidency, the Supreme Court has removed limits to corporate funding of political campaigns. Much of what passes for lobbying in the US would invite criminal investigations in Europe.
• Government regulators not only enjoy good relations with institutions they’re supposed to regulate, but a “resolving doors” culture means that every few years they actually swap places! E.g., the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) that is supposed to investigate suspected Wall Street fraudsters is actually more interested in protecting them.
• Symbiotic relations between private prison companies and the justice system; between pharmaceutical companies and doctors; advertisers and the news media; the privatized anti-terrorism sector and the politicians at the money spigots.
• Plea bargaining is a central element of the justice system; threats, rewards and coercion from the side of the prosecutors can steer results from the just legal outcome, as innocents are frequently tempted to settle for a lighter term in exchange for not running the risk of incurring a very heavy one.

Overall, corruption is far less prevalent in the UK, at least outside the financial sector. There is a long and ongoing scandal about M.P.’s expenses, in which politicians tabbed expenses unrelated to their work such as buying cars or redecorating apartments. But what stands out about them is that ultimately, the sums involved, going no higher than the $100,000′s, are really pretty modest by Russian standards, where typical political corruption scandals can run into the millions, tens of millions, and higher.

The most well-known corruption index is the Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) compiled by Transparency International, in which for 2010 the UK gets 7.6, the US gets 7.1, and Russia gets 2.1. The main problem with it is that it is not a measure of corruption per se, but of corruption perceptions; those who do the perceiving are mostly various Western experts and businesspeople; not only do they rely on the Western media extremely negative coverage of Russia, but as covered in the documentary film Inside Job, many of these same experts and businesspeople enable or even participate in corruption in their own countries!

I do not think Russia’s score, wedged in between Zimbabwe (2.2) and Equatorial Guinea (1.8), reflects its real level of corruption. While no-one disputes corruption is extremely prevalent in Russia, it does provide social services – in some sectors, like education, relatively good ones – to its population, and is surely far from those kleptocracies on any objective corruption scale. In fact there are a lot of other, similar absurdities in the CPI: for instance, Saudi Arabia – where most oil rents flow to a few thousand members of the House of Saud – is apparently cleaner than Italy, which is just WTF? See this comments thread for a critique of CPI’s methodology.

I think a fairer index is the Global Integrity Report, which actually analyzes the specific policies and laws rather than relying on something as fluffy as perceptions.  My own ranking would go, from least corrupt to most, something like: (Sweden) – UK / (Germany) – USA / (Italy / Belarus / 1980′s USSR) – Russia / (Greece) – (Ukraine / Mexico) – (Saudi Arabia / Nigeria) – (Equatorial Guinea / Congo / Somalia).

One aspect of corruption in which Russia may perform better than the US and the UK is in tax compliance by big corporations (though not small ones, in which under the table payments remain widespread). Simplified tax laws since 2000 have created more incentives to pay up, while the prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – widely condemned in the Western media – has made many big businessmen too afraid of using tax havens for tax avoidance. Tax collection has risen from around 50% of the expected take in the 1990′s to 90% by the mid-2000′s. Tax avoidance by big companies in Britain and the US seems to have become endemic in recent years, to the extent that a grassroots organization called Uncut has arisen to protest and harass them.

The Environment

At the popular level, only about half of Britons believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW); especially after the Climategate (non-)scandal. That said, environmental consciousness is undoubtedly most developed in Britain (if nowhere near the extent in Germany or Scandinavia). At least, one Green Party M.P. got elected in the last elections; whereas both US and Russian green parties are extremely marginal in the political process, and their activists are widely vilified.

On the plus side, Russia does not have the idiotic, ideologized AGW denialism that has taken over one of the main US parties, the Republicans.  That far north, the effects of global warming are clear – especially after the Great Russian Heatwave of 2010, in which a third of its grain crop was destroyed – and the only real question is about whether it should actually do much about it. After all, theoretically, a moderate degree of global warming would actually benefit Russia, by opening up agricultural lands in the north, clearing the Northern Sea Route, and making remote resources exploitable for the first time. However, there is a sizable number of people who view global warming as a natural climatic cycle (including Putin); many others, as in Canada, argue that even if it’s caused by humans, it would nonetheless be a positive development for the country, and that it should just bask in the sun and let the warming take its course.

Many Russians and Americans tend to assume the “cornucopian” view that there are few, if any, limits to growth on the planet. Though it is fast gaining political acceptance in Europe (including Britain), peak oil remains a fringe theory in the US (with the exception of California, which has a lot of unconventional thinkers, and survivalists), while Russia has many proponents of the theory of abiogenic petroleum origin, which holds that oil is created by constant geological processes, instead of biological processes in the distant past. As a high-density country that imports most of its energy and mineral resources, Britain is understandably far more concerned about the possibility that oil supplies won’t last forever.

The Military

Americans view their military very positively; in fact, the Armed Forces are the single most trusted institution in US life. To its fiscal woe, cutting the military budget – in nominal terms, almost as big as the rest of the world’s combined – is as unthinkable for Democrats as it is for conservative Republicans. This is despite the fact that military procurement is one of the most inefficient (and probably corrupt) sectors of the US economy. Seemingly innocuous gestures, such as arguing for cuts to the military, or questioning whether the US is over-reliant on military power in its dealings with the rest of the world, can get one labeled as unpatriotic; suggesting that the US may be repeating the mistakes of the USSR, which massively over-invested in military spending to the detriment of its civilian economy, can bring on apoplexy.

The British view their military positively, but without the overbearing reverence more typical of Americans. This means that defense cuts are politically feasible, and are indeed now being carried out by the Conservatives (if in a rather slapdash and incompetent way, as with most of their other policies). Their end result is that within a decade, the UK will cease to be a leading military Power. Instead, more resources are planned to be allocated to foreign aid for unstable countries such as Pakistan; it is clear that the plan is to put more emphasis on “soft power”.

I have already covered Russians’ views on the military in the first part of the series, in which I talked about conscription. As with  the US and the UK, though the military is viewed positively, opinions are split about the desirability of conscription and there is some doubt about its ability to defend the country. This is in part a result of two decades of degradation, of both the military and the military-industrial complex, after the fall of the Soviet Union. There is a huge rearmament plan in the works for the 2011-2020 period that the Kremlin hopes will decisively reverse these negative trends, and assuming oil prices stay high, it should be affordable too.

Reading the FT on Russia, what is interesting is not what they write – it is why they write it. A friend of T&B was told face-to-face about six months ago by an FT editor that, as a journalist here, one’s role has to be ”to write about how awful Russia is”. (While, admittedly, T&B does not know many FT journalists in Poland, Belgium or Mexico, we strongly suspect that they have an entirely different mandate. Only in Russia has the paper descended to outright advocacy…)

A recent propaganda piece in praise of Khodorkovsky – proudly splashed across the front page of the Financial Times in defiance of the most basic journalistic ethics – is so transparently self-serving, dishonest, and in a few points frankly absurd, that one is at a bit of a loss where to start. We shall borrow a technique from Russia: Other points of view – numbering the paragraphs in the original for discussion.

Khodorkovsky says Putin is ‘pitiable’

By Isabel Gorst in Moscow
Published: December 24 2010 14:27 | Last updated: December 24 2010 14
(and still at the top of their website three days later…)

(Inserted numbers are by T&B, for ease of reference.)

1. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the jailed Russian tycoon, has lashed out at Vladimir Putin, describing his nemesis as a pitiable but dangerous leader steering his country towards degradation and chaos.

2. In a newspaper article published on Friday, three days before a judge begins reading the verdict in a fresh trial that could keep him in jail until 2017, Mr Khodorkovsky said the Russian prime minister was trapped in the cynical political establishment he had created, indifferent to the fate of its people.

3. “I suddenly realised I was sorry for this man – no longer young, but vigorous and horribly lonely in the face of a vast and unsympathetic country,” he said.

4. The latest trial reaches its conclusion before the expiry of an eight-year sentence handed down after a first trial for fraud and tax evasion. After his conviction in 2005, Yukos, the giant oil producer he founded, was confiscated and sold, mainly to state oil companies, to help settle alleged tax debts.

5. Critics say the new charges are aimed at keeping Mr Khodorkovsky, who emerged as a champion of democracy before his arrest, behind bars long after presidential elections in 2012.

6. Together with Platon Lebedev, his business partner, Mr Khodorkovsky is now being tried on fresh charges of embezzlement that even his critics have slammed as absurd. On Monday, a Moscow judge will begin reading out a verdict that is expected to hand the two men additional prison sentences of six years.

7. The publication of the stinging article comes after Mr Putin suggested during a nationwide phone-in with Russians last week that Mr Khodorkovsky could have blood on his hands after Yukos’ former security chief was convicted for murder.

8. Defence lawyers for Mr Khodorkovsky accused Mr Putin of putting pressure on the judge to pronounce a guilty verdict and threatened to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights.

9. In his article, Mr Khodorkovsky said corruption had increased tenfold since Mr Putin came to power in 2000 and disputed the prime minister’s claims to have boosted stability in Russia.

10. He drew a direct link between rising corruption and the outbreak of racial clashes in Russian cities this month that has exposed a dangerous surge in ultra-nationalism in the country. “Don’t fool yourself. Thousands and thousands of suddenly brutalised youngsters are a clear signal that our children see no future for themselves. This is clearly the threatening result of Putin’s stability,” he wrote.

11. “They are our future, they are our grief, they are the most tragic result of the decade of ‘getting back on our feet’ when there was money in abundance but no compassion.”

12. Mr Khodorkovsky has said in the past he would stay out of politics after his release and dedicate his life to social and charitable projects. But on Friday he hinted of a possible return to politics. “ We will develop the country ourselves… We can do it. We are the people after all. And it is ours. Russia.”

13. Mr Khodorkovsky’s second trial is seen as a litmus test of Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president’s pledge to reform the judiciary and uproot corruption.

Speaking to television journalists on Friday, Mr Medvedev, a lawyer by training, refused to comment on the trial.

“Neither the president, nor any other official, has the right to express his or her position on this case or any other case before the verdict is passed, regardless of whether it is a guilty or an innocent verdict,” he said.

1. Anyone living in Russia in the 1990s knows precisely what “degradation and chaos” look like. If Mr. Khodorkovsky is the sole oligarch to be truly concerned for the well-being of the Russian populace, why was it that, when he was becoming fabulously wealthy as his country dissolved into disaster, he never went on the record to complain of it? Why did he pay just $200m for an oil company worth tens of billions when the country was sliding into bankruptcy? Why use offshore schemes instead of paying taxes if he was concerned with the commonweal?

2.  Again, Khodorkovsky – and especially his lieutenants the vicious Nezhlin and Lebedev – were notorious for his callous brutality. The privatization of Apatit alone filled up a medium-sized graveyard in the Urals. Russia may be a sometimes-brutal place, but people like him made it far more so.

3. Mr. Putin gives every sign of enjoying his job, and loneliness does not seem to be an issue for him. Perhaps Khodorkovsky is confusing the Prime Minister’s fate with his own.

4. Correct.

5. Khodorkovsky was never known to champion anything other than the power of the oligarchy. Had he been a champion of democracy, his first act would have been to stop freely corrupting the Russian Duma, media, and bureaucracy. Before his arrest, he never showed any signs of wishing to relinquish the corrupt oligarchic grip on the Russian political system. It is most unlikely that, were he to be freed tomorrow, he would do anything fundamentally different.

6. Nowhere else in the article are Khodorkovsky’s critics even identified – indeed, reading the FT text, it is hard to imagine that Khodorkovsky has any critics. T&B has not heard any of Khodorkovsky’s many critics describing the charges as “absurd” – perhaps the FT is confusing the words “critic” and “shill”. Otherwise, we would like to know who, precisely, they are referring to… Or did they simply invent it, in order to finish up the paragraph on a suitably acerbic note?

7. Khodorkovsky unquestionably DOES have blood on his hands. His head of security, Alexei Pichugin, is serving a 20-year sentence (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4393003.stm) for a series of contract murders: Menatep’s terror tactics were common knowledge in the 1990s, when their opponents lived in terror (and T&B was forbidden to write anything critical of them by our erstwhile employer). What is outrageous is that their head of security, the ex-KGB operative Pichugin, was convicted, but not the bosses who ordered the hits.

Explaining why he has not been accused, Khodorkovsky apologists claim that the charges would never hold up in court. Then, in almost the same breath, they claim that the courts are transparently manipulated by the government – one cannot have it both ways! Either the courts are fair, and Khodorkovsky is as guilty as Cain, or they are unfair, in which case it seems most unlikely that a murder charge would be rejected.

Perhaps the Russian government is holding the murder charge in reserve as an ultimate, nuclear threat against Yukos-Menatep if it were to do further damage – though we are at a loss to imagine what this further damage might be. In either event, it seems an outrage that justice not been done to the victims.

8. Prima facie absurd. Again, they have spent years telling us that the courts are totally controlled by the government. If so, why should Putin bother to publicly pressure a court which is in his pocket anyway? You cannot have it both ways. As for suing before the European Court of Human Rights – one can, if one wishes, sue the Bishop of Boston for Bastardy… But one is most unlikely to prevail.

9. He is on drugs! From what we read in the press, Russian corruption was reported to account for at least20% of GDP in 2000. So it now accounts for 200%? Why be so modest? Why not 2,000%??  More than 100% of GDP going to anything at all is a logical absurdity – but we are in the realm of fantasy here.

10. More insanity. “Suddenly brutalized” (!) – Russia has been a very hard place for the past several hundred years! Skinhead violence was as brutal and far more prevalent during the mid-1990s. It remains a serious problem. Anyone visiting the poorer suburbs of Moscow, but also of Paris or Brussels, will know how widespread it is.

Again, Khodorkovsky and his ilk showed no concern with such social ills in the past. Not surprising, in that they rode around in armoured limousines with large and well-armed security details.

11. Again, to claim that the “skinhead-nationalist-racist” problem is of recent vintage suggests he takes the journalists for morons (alas, at least in this one assessment, he is apparently correct!).

12. Mr. Khodorkovsky’s likelihood of winning an election of any sort in Russia is similar to T&B’s being appointed to the Holy Synod. Less likely really, since never having heard of him, the majority of the electorate does not hate T&B.

Anyone speaking a few words of Russian should simply ask a random selection of a) taxi drivers, b) shop clerks, c) people on the street car, what they think of the oligarchs in general – and of Khodorkovsky in particular. The responses will be fairly rabid. The only significant group of Russians supporting him is the small, English-speaking coterie of members of the Moscow chattering classes who surround most foreign journalists.

13. Who declared it a litmus test? The FT? Are they chemists? No one except the journalists and those in the pay of Menatep much cares anymore. It has been two years since a foreign investor enquired with us about this matter.

It is a criminal case against a man who was as guilty as the worst of his peers, but who, unlike them, refused to cease and desist after the feeble Yeltsin regime collapsed and a more purposeful government took its place.

Of course, Mr. Putin is being disingenuous when he claims that he does not have evidence against any of the other oligarchs. There is ample evidence against many of them. The difference is they knew when to quit, and were not megalomaniacal enough to threaten the Russian state.

We have said it before – we shall say it again. The “journalist” authoring this paper is either a fool or a knave – either corrupted by Yukos money, or totally ignorant of what was public knowledge in the 1990s: that the oil oligarchs were robbing the state blind!

The argument that trying Khodorkovsky now involves double-jeopardy suggests either laziness or intentional disinformation. A quick look at Wikipedia will show that the first Khodorkovsky trial was for the criminal privatization of Apatit, not for the theft from Yukos.

In fact, the ONLY credible legal defense for Khodorkovsky is the “everyone was doing it too” argument. There is only one problem – that it is not a legal defense.  We are not aware of any system of justice where it would be an accepted defense. The fact that there were other Ponzi schemes was not exculpatory for Bernie Madoff; that other guys were trading on insider information did not keep Boesky out of jail. People with dark and ugly pasts are best advised to be very, very careful and to avoid antagonizing those who could hold them to account for their past crimes… and the FT damned well knows it!

Lies, Damned lies, and the FT

A number of our readers have written to us expressing skepticism as regards our version of the Yukos affaire. This is hardly surprising – we scan the mainstream Western press in vain for anyone seriously questioning what has become the official narrative.

Is it not extraordinary that none of the famously free and fair Western media even expresses doubt as to whether he is not, in fact, guilty as charged? Could they, in fact, be regimented and beholden to a very specific agenda?

As we have noted previously – we do not find Russia either more or less corrupt than the West. The difference is that Russia has mostly “honest corruption” i.e. well-stuffed envelopes – fee-for-service, without any particular hypocrisy. In the West, on the other hand, the media are bought, generally not for cash.

Cash, of course, does play a vital role. Despite the best efforts of the Russian state, Yukos/Menatep retains control of its stolen billions parked abroad (it is for this reason that the Russian administration rightly fears Khodorkovsky – clever, vicious, infused with a sense of mission, with unlimited access to Western corridors of power, and controlling a multi-billion dollar war chest – back on the street he could be infinitely more pernicious than the equally criminal Berezovsky). This money is channeled through a dense network of political fixers, right-wing think tanks, Washington political operatives, PR and government relations firms (notably APCO, run, disconcertingly, by one Margery Kraus… no relation!), law firms such as Robert Amsterdam (essentially a very effective political huckster posing as an attorney), with scores of Western public figures on the payroll.

We do not have any evidence that publications such as the FT actually receive cash for their disinformation. That would be too simple. The most senior editors lunch with the good and the great – they attended the same schools – sit at the same clubs. Underpaid, they thrive on honours, access, that sense of belonging. Perhaps we are naïve – perhaps some cold cash changes hands. Simply – we are not aware of it.

Whatever the reason – the fact that it is openly “corrupt” is beyond reasonable dispute. The reader can draw his own conclusions as to whether a similar letter written by Bernard Madoff expressing his pity for Barack Obama would have made it onto the front pages of the FT!

This headline news was, after all, nothing more than a poorly drafted broadside by a convicted criminal lashing out at the legitimate government of his country. The fact that Khodorkovsky stole billions rather than millions clearly justifies his moving up on the page – but it does not make this front-page news!

No – the article was placed. Powerful and well-financed sources saw to it that it was given front page coverage. Money CAN buy you “Truth” in the Western press – and unlike the slightly jaded Russian populace, Westerners actually believe their own propaganda.

Other Khodorkovsky coverage of note since my last update: A Journalist Unmuzzled! – A Private Communication (how MSM editors dictate what Western journalists can effectively say – same Eric Kraus); Enough Grandstanding About Khodorkovsky, Ms. Clinton! (the hypocrisy of “rule of law” lectures from a nation that holds dozens of people indefinitely without trial – Yvonne Ridley); Khodorkovsky 2017 (doing the motions – Khodorkovsky’s lawyers); Oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky gets six more years (exercise: how many journalistic fallacies can you spot in this Independent piece?).

1. As usual, the only people who care about this are Western politicians eager to score cheap shots against Russia’s “assault” on transparency and rule of law (note that the same people have no problem with repressing Wikileaks and killing Assange – everyone should be subject to equal scrutiny, but some more equally than others!); MBK’s lawyers and PR-men whose job this is; and the legions of naifs, fools and ideologues manipulated by them. BTW, my favorite photo is above, showing elderly ladies parading with that chic glossy poster of their hero, with Medvedev and Putin darkly conspiring behind his back. I’m sure they funded it all out of their pensions.

2. The standard argument of MBK’s PR-men goes something like this: how could Khodorkovsky be guilty of embezzling $25bn, from his own company? And especially considering that he’s already been found guilty of tax evasion? But that’s just begging the question; insinuations, not facts. While MBK *might* not be directly guilty of this, I’m sure the prosecutors have found some legal loophole or another sufficient to convict him. I can imagine a scenario where the proceeds from the tax evasion he was originally convicted for – if retained by MBK’s various LLC’s and holding companies, which they presumably were – could also legally constitute embezzlement.

The issue then becomes a question of whether Russia’s laws against double jeopardy apply to this case; it’s theoretically possible to both evade taxes, and consequently to deprive your shareholders of dividends, i.e. embezzlement. I don’t know the legalistic details but neither do more than 99% of the pundits; what I do want to stress is that even from the legalistic viewpoint, stressed by MBK’s defenders, things are far from a straightforward case of “Putin’s vendetta” against the “independent businessman”.

3. I’m not going to reiterate the other arguments as to why Medvedev should pardon MBK (e.g. that in itself it a subversion of the legal process; that the US imprisons people without trial at Guantanamo doesn’t give me free reign to abduct passersby into my basement Juggler-style; that he never cared about rule of law until it boomeranged back against him). The bottom line is he failed at his power grab. Too bad for him, he should have used his ill-gotten gains on buying foreign football clubs and luxury yachts with AA systems. Smallest violin in the world playing for his lost opportunities!

4. The liberal intelligentsia and libertarian oligarch-apologists love yapping on about how Khodorkovsky’s political “persecution” will lead to investors withdrawing their money from that non-BRICworthy economic hellhole, that is Russia. I checked specifically for this and observed absolutely zero discernible effect on the RTS stockmarket around when MBK was found guilty on December 27th. (Of course, pardoning criminals just to appease the hurt feelings of international capital is perhaps the most reprehensible pro-MBK argument of them all).

A foreign “subversive” journalist, driven by fevered idealism, publishes reams of leaked internal documents from an Authority that, beneath its carefully positioned mask of civility, honor and justice, views the whole world – of both friend or foe – as its own playground, and engages in the most corrupt and underhanded wheelings and dealing to maintain its lofty pretensions to hegemony. Though the Authority is entirely comfortable with selectively using the material contained therein to legitimize its ideological-imperialist projects to the public, its minions in the Mainstream Media and even its most prominent Archons experience no cognitive dissonance in calling for that accursed fiend, the revealer, to be branded with the number of the Beast that is “terrorist”, and to be henceforth sentenced to eternal imprisonment, or the death penalty, or the most apocalyptic of all, a Perunian thunderstrike from the skies. Now if this were real life as allegory, what would it it refer to?

Perhaps its the Mooslims? Nah, the Islamists aren’t that well organized or articulate. More to the point, they don’t leave extensive paper trails. The Rooskies? But when Russian officials make shady threats, their targets at least tend to be Russian Federation citizens and real traitors. No – as usual, it’s the West and its hypocrisy at its finest.

Now let’s make some things clear, first. As Defense Sec. Robert Gates correctly points out, the real impact of Wikileaks is modest. For instance, one of the ostensible “shocker” cables, revealing the support of the Arab elites for a US strike on Iranian nuclear installations, was well known in geopolitical circles well beforehand (heck, I mentioned this back in August and earlier). Even the impact of these official revelations on the “Arab street” are likely to be minimal, given that (1) polls show a (slight) majority of Arabs in Egypt and Lebanon willing to resort to military force to prevent an Iranian nuke and (2) alleged censorship of Wikileaks in the region.

Nor is Wikileaks – at least as of now – causing major tensions, or repressive attempts at censorship, in countries like Russia. (PLEASE READ: Throwing Down the Gauntlet on Wikileaks & Russia). This is in stark contrast to the claims of the Western MSM in the prelude to Cablegate, e.g. Christian Science Monitor:

Wikileaks ready to drop a bombshell on Russia. But will Russians get to read about it? Wikileaks is about to release documents on Russia, but the tightly-controlled Russian media is unlikely to report them the way Western media attacked the documents about Afghanistan and Iraq.

Which is of course why state news agency RIA and Gazprom-owned Kommersant both reported it on the same day. And as of now, there are literally thousands of results in the Russian news on Cablegate. Way to fail LOL!

Then Simon Shuster writing for TIME took an anonymous FSB comment (to Russian website LifeNews) and ran with it to make all kinds of fantastical insinuations about how the Kremlin would poison Assange or crash the Wikileaks site. Of course the Pentagon’s / CIA’s war against Assange is hardly mentioned (remember the 100-strong anti-Wikileaks unit set up by the Pentagon? The honey trap & rape accusations against Assange in Sweden?), but the funniest quote is this one:

So the most likely Russian reaction, at least at first, would be to undermine the authenticity of the alleged secrets. “That is the main tool, to filter it through the state-controlled mass media, which would discredit WikiLeaks and put into question the reliability of its sources,” says Nikolai Zlobin, director of the Russia and Eurasia Project at the World Security Institute in Washington, D.C. “This would limit any public debate of the leak to the Russian internet forums and news websites, which reach a tiny fraction of the population.”

Guess what, I agree! The only problem is that Russia would just be ripping a page straight out off the Western playbook!

• The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters
• Fact-free accusations about WikiLeaks
• More on the media’s Pentagon-subservient WikiLeaks coverage
• NYT v. the world: WikiLeaks coverage

As of now, Russia is surviving the Wikileaks storm in pretty good shape. What have we got so far? The absolutely shocking kompromat on the Kremlin-ideologist-without-an-ideology Surkov, who apparently has an Obama portrait in his office and likes Tupac; Ramzan Kadyrov clumsily dancing with a gold-plated Kalashnikov stuck in his jeans at a Daghestani wedding that might as well be out of a modern day Prisoner of the Caucasus novel; the Russian account of the South Ossetia War is if anything further confirmed, the picture being one of US diplomats willing to believe anything their Georgian intermediaries told them about the evil imperialist Rooskies; oh, and the matter of Russia being a “mafia kleptcracy”, at least as per US diplomats channeling marginal Russian oppositionists.

González said the FSB had two ways to eliminate “OC leaders who do not do what the security services want them to do”. The first was to kill them. The second was to put them in jail to “eliminate them as a competitor for influence”.

Erm, isn’t this what security forces anywhere are SUPPOSED to do?? (And I’d note there’s no shortage of historical examples of the CIA working hand in hand with organized crime to reach desired political outcomes in foreign countries, e.g. see Operation GLADIO). And, I mean, sure, it’s no secret to anybody who doesn’t live underneath a rock that there’s lots of shady and rather nasty people in the Russian bureaucracy; but without any names, there’s nothing new and all this diplo gossiping is all rather useless. Former Moscow Mayor Luzhkov is a centroid of corruption? You don’t say… (and perhaps soon to be forgotten with his recent ousting and move into the opposition).

As with Russia, there is – as of now – nothing truly compromising in the US files. Just some uncomfortable moments, and assessments of foreign leaders: e.g. see right, and the characterization of Azeri President Ilham Aliyev as being “Michael (Corleone) on the outside, Sonny on the inside”, and his alleged use of criminal slang. Remember the  walkout on Ahmadinjad’s UN speech? Wikileaks reveals that it was an American initiative. The Swedish ambassador was supposed to leave the hall when Ahmadinejad came to the keyword “Holocaust” (and presumably its denial as he is wont to do). But this time Ahmadinejad refrained. So the poor Swede was left in a fluster when Ahmadinejad actually failed to mention the H-word, and could only frantically consult the Americans on what to do next. And so the circus goes on…

But none of this is the real point. Up till now, Wikileaks is just not that big of a game changer. The real point is the reaction to them in the West. And what that reaction says about the erosion of civil liberties in the past decade in the name of the holy “war on terror.” Regrettably, it is at this point that #cablegate is no longer a laughing matter. It becomes a mirror on the degenerating Western political soul.

Now I don’t know about you, but when an adviser to Canadian PM Harper openly calls for the assassination of Julian Assange (with no apparent consequences); when in actions reminiscent of China’s iron grip on its Internet, US politicians presume to demand – and get – American servers to pull Wikileaks; when there is serious consideration at the highest political levels of charging foreigners with treason against the US (a contradiction in terms); when former and potential future US Presidential candidates like Sarah Palin* – not to mention prominent commentators and numberless freepers – call for Assange to be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders”, and assassinated without charges, trial or due process; when all this happens, I become concerned about the future sustainability of the liberal political system in the face of the creeping advance of the national security-cum-surveillance state.

I don’t want to be melodramatic, but the right’s reaction to this affair is eerily totalitarian. Dehumanization? Check – see the rape charges, the classic intelligence agency smear against inconvenients everything.

On the issue of the Interpol arrest warrant issued yesterday for Assange’s arrest:  I think it’s deeply irresponsible either to assume his guilt or to assume his innocence until the case plays out.   I genuinely have no opinion of the validity of those allegations, but what I do know — as John Cole notes — is this:  as soon as Scott Ritter began telling the truth about Iraqi WMDs, he was publicly smeared with allegations of sexual improprieties.  As soon as Eliot Spitzer began posing a real threat to Wall Street criminals, a massive and strange federal investigation was launched over nothing more than routine acts of consensual adult prostitution, ending his career (and the threat he posed to oligarchs).  And now, the day after Julian Assange is responsible for one of the largest leaks in history, an arrest warrant issues that sharply curtails his movement and makes his detention highly likely.

If I had to make a guess, I’d say Assange’s impropriety was limited to a one-night stand, in a culture where awkwardly lengthy dating and mating rituals are the apparent norm. Presumably, he failed to “satisfy” the ladies – not due to any lack of his own efforts, if it was a CIA sting – and thus got himself screwed several months later.

After the smear, as chronicled by Glenn Greenwald, comes “the increasingly bloodthirsty two-minute hate session aimed at Julian Assange, also known as the new Osama bin Laden“:

The ringleaders of this hate ritual are advocates of — and in some cases directly responsible for — the world’s deadliest and most lawless actions of the last decade.  And they’re demanding Assange’s imprisonment, or his blood, in service of a Government that has perpetrated all of these abuses and, more so, to preserve a Wall of Secrecy which has enabled them. To accomplish that, they’re actually advocating — somehow with a straight face — the theory that if a single innocent person is harmed by these disclosures, then it proves that Assange and WikiLeaks are evil monsters who deserve the worst fates one can conjure, all while they devote themselves to protecting and defending a secrecy regime that spawns at least as much human suffering and disaster as any single other force in the world.  That is what the secrecy regime of the permanent National Security State has spawned. …

In this latest WikiLeaks release — probably the least informative of them all, at least so far — we learned a great deal as well.  Juan Cole today details the 10 most important revelations about the Middle East.  Scott Horton examines the revelation that the State Department pressured and bullied Germany out of criminally investigating the CIA’s kidnapping of one of their citizens who turned out to be completely innocent.  … British officials, while pretending to conduct a sweeping investigation into the Iraq War, were privately pledging to protect Bush officials from embarrassing disclosures.  Hillary Clinton’s State Department ordered U.N. diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data in order to spy on top U.N. officials and others, likely in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961 (see Articles 27 and 30; and, believe me, I know:  it’s just “law,” nothing any Serious person believes should constrain our great leaders).

And there’s no shortage of that freeper and neocon carrion awaiting the feeding frenzy with baited breath.

First we have the group demanding that Julian Assange be murdered without any charges, trial or due process.  There was Sarah Palin on on Twitter illiterately accusing WikiLeaks — a stateless group run by an Australian citizen — of “treason”; she thereafter took to her Facebook page to object that Julian Assange was “not pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders” (she also lied by stating that he has “blood on his hands”:  a claim which even the Pentagon admits is untrue).  Townhall’s John Hawkins has a column this morningentitled ”5 Reasons The CIA Should Have Already Killed Julian Assange.”  That Assange should be treated as a “traitor” and murdered with no due process has been strongly suggested if not outright urged by the likes ofMarc Thiessen, Seth Lipsky (with Jeffrey Goldberg posting Lipsky’s column and also illiterately accusing Assange of “treason”), Jonah Goldberg, Rep. Pete King, and, today, The Wall Street Journal.

The way in which so many political commentators so routinely and casually call for the eradication of human beings without a shred of due process is nothing short of demented.  Recall Palin/McCain adviserMichael Goldfarb’s recent complaint that the CIA failed to kill Ahmed Ghailani when he was in custody, or Glenn Reynolds’ morning demand — in between sips of coffee — that North Korea be destroyed with nuclear weapons (“I say nuke ‘em. And not with just a few bombs”).  Without exception, all of these people cheered on the attack on Iraq, which resulted in the deaths of more than 100,000 innocent human beings, yet their thirst for slaughter is literally insatiable.  After a decade’s worth of American invasions, bombings, occupations, checkpoint shootings, drone attacks, assassinations and civilian slaughter, the notion that the U.S. Government can and should murder whomever it wants is more frequent and unrestrained than ever.

Those who demand that the U.S. Government take people’s lives with no oversight or due process as though they’re advocating changes in tax policy or mid-level personnel moves – eradicate him!, they bellow from their seats in the Colosseum — are just morally deranged barbarians.  There’s just no other accurate way to put it. These are usually the same people, of course, who brand themselves “pro-life” and Crusaders for the Sanctity of Human Life and/or who deride Islamic extremists for their disregard for human life.  ….

It didn’t have to be this way. The ultimate significance of Wikileaks is limited: it gives the peons a glimpse into high diplomacy (and underlines the US need for greater information control in this sphere); as Craig Willy points out, it enables a convergence of history and political science, and hence a “contemporary history” (the same point is made by Timothy Garton Ash); and it underlines the rather colonialist, entitlement-ridden, and frequently culturally challenged (just consult the Moscow cables in which diplomats repeat the MSM journalists on Russia virtually verbatim) mindset of the US diplomatic corps. But little of it is can be considered truly malevolent**.

No, what’s really damning about this affair is the elite’s uniform propaganda against an organ committed to finding and leaking their darkest and most sordid secrets. The compliance of the “exceptional” and “constitutional-loving” Western sheeple in further promoting their already abysmal ignorance. And funniest of all, the Fourth Estate’s own screeds against government openness and unaccountability: “uncritically passing on one government claim after the next — without any contradiction, challenge, or scrutiny”, and their sole complaint being that the glorious State isn’t restrictive enough. As I wrote about the Western MSM years back:

Control is all about imposing your view of reality on the minds of others. Since overt political persecution is no longer widely accepted, the elites have resorted to fighting wars over hearts and minds. Western media manipulation is not readily noticeable, since if that were the case the simulation’s plausibility would fall apart immediately (as was the case in the Soviet Union)…This makes them far more insidious and dangerous to freedom than any repressive dictatorship; for in the latter one knows one is a slave, while too many Westerners continue to be believe they are free, whereas in fact they are also slaves, like the rest of us.

It’s truer than ever, as Westerners shun or smash the last mirrors available to them, and Orwell continues spinning in his grave.

* I left the message “I support Sarah’s righteous demand to hunt down Assange in close cooperation with our North Korean allies” at Sarah Palin’s Facebook Page. It was a reference to a recent gaffe of hers (or more likely a demonstration of political cluelessness). A few hours later, I discovered that my comment had been removed and censored, and that I was also blocked from making further comments on Sarah Palin’s Facebook page

** I must also stress that these cables are far from the most highly classified secrets. The real juicy bits can only be accessed by the President and a dozen others, but the chances of them ever being Wikileaked are really, really low.

Following on the ground-breaking and globally acknowledged Karlin Freedom Index (which is of course by far the most objective, accurate, comprehensive and plain awesome democracy measuring tool available to political scientists today), I’m now revealing the Karlin Corruption Index (KCI) which rates transparency based on my own readings, personal impressions and bigoted prejudices. As with the “democracy indices” (Freedom House et al.), the current corruption indices – the most prominent of which is Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) - just don’t do all that of a great job. Let me explain why.

First, let’s have a look at the very language of corruption. Contrary to what one might expect, almost all linguistic terms for bribery are either neutral or even positive and are related to some of (1) “gift”, (2) small “tip” or tip, or (3) “greasing” i.e. a way of making things flow smoother, (4) “understanding”. I suspect the reason is that corruption, as long as it’s systematized, cannot unravel a state by itself, and in some cases even creates positive effects. Arguing to absurdity, a “gift economy” society of the type seen in hunter-gathering societies, kibbutzim or hippie coops would probably be given a 0/10 for transparency by the CPI’s methodology. But does that really mean anything?

Similar critiques can, in part, be extended to states. In highly regulated countries, giving kickbacks may be the optimal way of running businesses, employing people and generating growth (e.g. Russia, Italy). In highly stratified societies, increasing public spending to improve social mobility – even if part of that spending is siphoned off and contributes to more corruption – may be the socially just decision (e.g. Venezuela). In economically backwards nations, purposefully turning a blind eye to copyrights and IP violations may lead to faster development (e.g. 19th C Germany, China)*.

Second, I must stress that corruption isn’t a concrete number, it’s a vague, fluid and opaque-by-definition social phenomenon that can mean any number of different things in different cultures. Relying on the subjective perceptions of “experts” and businesspeople, as in the Corruption Perceptions Index, is suspect, since they come with their own sets of biases and tropes: lack of attention to statistics and opinion polls; very optimistic assumptions about free markets; disregard for cultural context and popular stereotypes; non-appreciation of the fact that “legalized corruption” is still corruption (e.g. what passes for lobbying in the US would be regarded as corruption in many European countries); etc. Check out this comment thread at A Good Treaty’s interview on this blog for a good discussion of the failings of the CPI.

Now I could go on with the caveats, but as they’re all rather boring and self-evident, it’s time for the succulent part: the actual Karlin Corruption Index country rankings themselves. As with the CPI, 10 is best, 0 is worst. The ↑ and ↓ arrows indicate the trend.

10

Only a few countries like Sweden make it here, though so do many small communities strong in Asabiya.

9

Clean countries with relatively little corruption such as Germany (↓), Canada and Australia, as well as US states such as Massachusetts.

8

These are countries where corruption begins to acquire big dimensions amongst the elites, but remains small at the lower rungs. The United States (↓) is here because privileged corporations enjoy extensive government largess, often at the expense of ordinary citizens (especially in the defense, oil, and financial services sectors). For the skeptics, The Quiet Coup by Simon Johnson is required reading.

The trends are negative. Corporate influence (disguised under Tea Party populism) is growing under the “socialist” (LOL) Obama administration: the overturning of corporate funding limits on political campaigns, BP’s requisitioning of Louisiana police to suppress freedom of speech, and the uncontrolled growth of the privatized anti-terrorism sector are just three examples that come to mind. Though these might not make it into the considerations of the experts and businesspeople gauging US “transparency”, I don’t think that makes it any less corrupt for all that.

Though the elites feed off the public trough, corruption is much less prevalent at lower levels. In countries like Russia or Mexico, corruption in institutions like the traffic police is the rule; in the US it isn’t even an exception – it’s practically unheard of. That’s because in rich, socially cohesive nations, corruption is simply too expensive for simple people. For this reason, I think the US is still above a 6 at the very least, and probably above a 7. But as the popular saying goes, the fish rots from the head. If the economy stagnates and corrupt elites continue misleading the public with “spontaneous” Astroturf organizations, then who knows, by 2020 you could be driving down Route 101 when a policeman pulls you ever and asks if you want to “reach an understanding”.

Other countries in this category include the UK (↓), France (↓), Japan and Israel (↓), where things are ostensibly all prim and proper but the elites live by different rules from the rest in the darker corners. US states like Texas, New York, California and Ohio are probably in this category.

7

In this category corruption becomes more brazen amongst the elites and discernible (but far from prevalent) in the lower levels. Examples would include Brazil (↑), Poland (↑) and Korea. Credit where it’s due: Saakashvili might be a semi-authoritarian warmonger, but he’s cut corruption in Georgia from near failed state levels to almost respectable. Most of the Visegrad region, the East Asian tigers, and the American Deep South would be in this category.

6

Corruption amongst the elites is brazen, most government contracts go to the well-connected, and the elites live by laws very *visibly* different from those of the commoners. At everyday levels, corruption becomes hard to miss: traffic policemen can be bribed; grades can be bought. That said, society functions and there certainly remains substantial room for success based on purely meritocratic achievement.

Even a year ago, I’d have put Russia (↑) into the 4-5 range below. However, the (never-ending) “war on corruption” is no long just talk (as it was under Putin). It is fast producing real results. Regional governors, especially the most entrenched (and corrupt) ones are being fired and replaced by younger technocrats associated with Medvedev’s “civiliki” group, with Luzhkov being just the latest example. There are plans to cut 20% of bureaucrats, replacing them with government e-services. The fast growth in the average bribe size is a positive sign: it indicates that the risk premium for giving and taking bribes is growing.

But wait a second… the situation might be improving, but wasn’t it Zimbabwe-like to begin with, according to the CPI? I really doubt it. Corruption just isn’t that common in everyday life (in 2010 only 15% of Russians paid a bribe, which is roughly comparable to countries like Bulgaria, Turkey and the Czech Republic, but certainly not to sub-Saharan African nations where it’s typically more than 50%). As for the elites, corruption in that world is certainly pervasive and fairly damaging: e.g. about 50% to 2/3 of allocated funds are lost in the road construction sector. But that said, there’s a fair bit of exaggeration towards the apocalyptic side, as with the $8bn Sochi “road of beluga caviar” – which was actually also a railway with dozens of bridges and mountain tunnels. Despite Stanislav Belkovsky’s unsupported assertions, there’s no evidence or reason to believe Putin has amassed a $50bn fortune. Though I’m of the 1988 cohort, I still remember the time when Yeltsin’s “Family” were more or less openly stealing from the state budget. Back then Russia would have scored a 3-4 on this Index. My impression is that the current guys at the very top are relatively clean and that fiscal transparency has come a long way.

This category also includes Italy, though it could be one level higher and there are of course wide regional variations (Sicily: 4-5, the North: 6-8). AFAIK, its one serious attempt to root out structural corruption in the early 1990′s fizzled out, and Silvio Berlusconi – who unlike Putin we actually *know* to be a corrupt billionaire – isn’t exactly the best poster boy for transparency.

My inclusion of China (↑) here will also be controversial, since there are any number of anecdotal tales about the unholy alliances springing up between regional Communist Party heads and ruthless businessmen to dispossess peasants of land, erect shoddy infrastructure, etc. But on the other hand the country still functions well, large-scale corruption is punishable with the death penalty (there’s a little disincentive!) and the central Party is composed of relatively clean technocrats.

Other countries in this category include Turkey, South Africa, Romania and Cuba. Historically, the post-thaw Soviet Union was in this category until its dissolution. I think most of Latin America would be in the 4-6 range.

5

At this level corruption is very brazen amongst the elites and prevalent in everyday life. Social mobility is becoming severely constrained amongst those without good family connections or a particular talent for palms-greasing.

Russia has been in this category since the early 2000′s and has (arguably) only exited it recently. If this article is halfway accurate, Greece belongs here. I think that in the past two years Mexico (↓) has deteriorated from 5-6 to this level because of the subversion of its police force and parts of the political and judicial structure by its narco gangs. As they haven’t seen Russia’s recent high profile anti-corruption campaign, Ukraine and Belarus probably remain at this level. Venezuela (↓) does provide middle-income country type social services and has greatly expanded them in the last ten years (i.e. the majority of money is not stolen as claimed by anti-Chavez critics and neocons). However, there’s been little progress on corruption and the problem appears to be getting worse.

Other countries in this category include India, Iran (↓), India and Kazakhstan.

4

As we move down to this level a kind of neo-feudal world is beginning to emerge, in which doors begin to get fully close to the unconnected. The elites cannot be held accountable by the courts; wealth, power and political connections determine everything . I think Azerbaijan and Egypt belong here, as does 1990′s Russia.

3

The stealing becomes ever more systemic, the elites ever more unaccountable: examples include Saudi Arabia, where corruption is institutionalized in the flow of huge oil rents to privileged members of the House of Saud (even the country is named after them!), and Nigeria, where most of the revenues from the oil boom of the last decade appear to have been diverted to politicians’ bank accounts. Other countries in this category include Iraq (↑), Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

2

These are the countries run like personal fiefdoms, neo-feudal monarchies in all but name. The best example here is Equatorial Guinea, which is almost the definition of oil kleptocracy – the President and his buddies rake in all the petrodollars to their Swiss bank accounts, normal people live in a squalor undifferentiated from their Cameroonian neighbors. Other countries in this category include Zimbabwe, Turkmenistan and North Korea.

But keep things in perspective. Living in societies with a KCI of 0-3 has been the lot of the vast majority of humans in history.

1

When there’s anarchy, the concept of corruption becomes rather meaningless. This is what it looks like: “In eastern Congo, $1 billion in gold is being extracted and exported annually, yet because the government lacks control over the territory the revenues for the national Treasury last year were a mere $37,000.”

Everything becomes a matter of connections and “understandings” between people, and such is life in Congo, Somalia and Afghanistan.

0

* I recommend the book Kicking Away the Ladder by Ha-Joon Chang on copyrights and IP issue in developing nations.