Almost exactly a year ago, one lucky Russian family received a free brand new SUV from the government. What had they done to deserve such a gift? They managed to have a baby on Russia Day - June 12th.

That much publicised campaign was only the tip of a creepy pro-natalist iceberg, including $11o00 cash gifts to women who have a second child, and even setting aside an official holiday solely for the purpose of procreation.

According to a chipper NYTarticle at the time,

“Last year, as president, Mr. Putin declared 2008 the Year of the Family. On Sept. 12, a holiday called Family Contact Day encouraged Russians to stay home and engage in marital intimacy in the hopes of producing children on Russia Day, nine months later, on June 12.

The new holiday extends Russia’s promotion of procreation, urging couples not only to have children but also to provide those children with two-parent, stable family lives”.

So, year on, what has come of this quasi-eugenic experiment (designed as much to increase Russian birth rates as maintain an unsavoury demographic edge over the ‘invading races’  of Caucasian and Central Asian immigrants)?

Indeed, worries about declining birthrates are nothing new, and not confined to Russia.

In her brilliant essay, writer Kerry Howley notes that “modern fertility panic stems from… societies…projecting their deepest anxieties onto empty wombs”.

In fact, post-Cold War Russia shares many of the key triggers of birth-rate panics: state failure, fear of invasion, racism from immigrant influx.

“In times of collective insecurity,”, writes Howland, “empty wombs are cast as either a cause or a symptom of a state supposedly in decline. Pro-natalism became a French obsession after Germany invaded France in the late 19th century. In 19th century America, President Theodore Roosevelt was particularly concerned about the “race suicide” of white Protestants”.

“Every pro-fertility policy is an effort to slow cultural transformation, to stabilize a society’s ethnic composition, to ossify a current conception of a national culture by freezing the genetic makeup of a nation”, she writes.

Because natal movements are anchored in a reactionary and sexist retrenchment in times of national trauma, it’s no surprise that Russia’s current government should spearhead one: “In times of great social anxiety, we see new calls for women to return to home and hearth”.

Quite aside from turning women into child-factories, the policy was deeply flawed from the very beginning.

Yasha Levine, one of the few Western reporters to give the policy a critical dissection, uncovered the harrowing truth about the brutal race to give birth exactly on Russia Day.

Expectant mothers, whom poverty had driven to desperately seek the prizes on offer, “revealed that labor was being artificially induced on a massive scale that day, and it had nothing to do with patriotism. Their stories were of women desperate to give birth on June 12 and doctors all too eager to oblige”.

In the words of one mother: “Women were asking, practically begging, their doctors to do it,” she said. “They had their babies that day because of the presents; they put their health at risk. It was sick”.

According to Levine, Sergei Morozov, United Russia’s natalist architect, “emerged as the event’s only true winner. He apparently found a solution to what Vladimir Putin calls Russia’s most acute problem. And he did it in a way that avoids the laborious work of tackling the crisis at its root: fixing basic infrastructure, creating jobs, and improving the quality of life”.

A year later, Levine’s characterisation has been proven eerily correct.  According to an article in today’s Moscow Times, “extremely high mortality rates among Russian men of child-bearing age… largely the result of alcohol consumption and drug abuse, are undercutting…Moscow’s efforts to solve the country’s demographic problems”.

The women having settled in to their new role as ‘national mothers’, it’s the men’s turn to become the objects of the government’s crazy birth policies. But it turns out that Russian guys, more attached to the bottle than any babie, aren’t quite up to their new role of sperm Stakhanovs:

According to another United Russia apparatchik, “there are currently a total of 22 million men aged 20 to 40, the prime age group for new fathers. ‘Of these,’ however, ‘about 700,000 are in prison, 2.1 million are registered alcoholics — and how many of those are uncounted,’ Mironov continues. There are also 2.5 million drug addicts. As a result, 5.3 million potential fathers are not as available as others”.

Of course, even a drunk knows that instead of giving away cars and fridges, the best way to boost birth rates is to make Russia a place into which couples would wish to bring a child.

But, considering Putin’s typically nuanced solution to the ‘problem’ - ‘Russians should drink less’ - this New Natalism will almost certainly miscarry again.

Margaret Warner (The News Hour) is doing a good job of setting the scene for President Obama’s visit to Russia next week.  Talking in Moscow with a cross-section of media, government spokesmen, activists and Kremlin-watchers, Warner’s reports this week paint a fairly nuanced picture.  Stability but arbitrary authority.  Economic growth (until last year) but great social disparities.  Outspoken voices but widespread public complacency.  Russia sometimes seems capable of continuing on such a course indefinitely.

But for her natural resources and nuclear weapons, Russia would not be a very compelling stop on Obama’s itinerary.  Yet these two exceptions, and the instability along much of the vast periphery of Russia and its “near abroad,” change everything.  How Russia acts internationally, when domestically capable of such arbitrariness, is of great relevance and concern.

Yulia Latynina adds another useful perspective, describing in today’s Moscow Times how Russia’s new oil deal with China is more disadvantageous to Russia than the prospective deal that helped earn Khodorkovsky Putin’s ire.  Another indicator that what would seem to be in Russia’s best interest may not be the road Russia travels.

Obama’s visit should tell us a lot about how we should view Russia.

For his birthday on Friday, Russia’s most famous prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky held an online Q&A with readers of Gazeta.ru, a popular online daily.

In it he defends himself against allegations of robber-baronism and asset stripping, and says: “I decided to take the risk and have never felt sorry for that”.

But much more interesting than the actual ‘interview’ (in English, here) were the hundreds of comments left by readers, using their livejournal accouts.

The 360 some comments started as a popular referendum on Khodorkovsky, but quickly veered into a judgement of the environmnet out of which he rose: the 1990s.

And the picture they paint is at odds with many common perceptions of Russia.

From one point of view, the average Western reader reared on pious reporting about the injustices of his trial and expecing unanimous popular support for Khodorkovsky would be surprised by just how polarising a figure he remains.

Many commenters seethed with anger, accusing Khodorkovsky of painting himself a martyr while having looted his country in the 1990s; some even accused him of ordering the murders of his opponents.

But an equally surprising thing for observers of Russia accustomed to the passivity of state media and ubiquity of propaganda is just how many people openly voiced their support for the prisoners, coupled with vigorous denunciations of the government.

I was very surprised by the fact that the messageboards were pretty evenly split between supporters and detractors of the man.

There were those who supported him from the liberal right for being a good businessman, denoucing the state for gouging a company much more productive than the state energy enterprises.

There were those who denounced him from the patriotic right for stealing from the Soviet state in the 1990s.

Then there were those from the liberal left who hated his venal and ruthless actions but who were equally appaled by his heavy-handed and clumsy political incarceration: As one commenter wrote: ” I am ready to hate Khodorkovsky. The only things that are keeping me from doing it are the sham trial and his politically motivated capture”.

This was civil society in all its rich, vibrant action, commentary that ran the full gamut of opinion and ideology that can exist in society.

It made me hopeful that whatever the state of Russian justice it, there is a vigorous and well-informed debate that surrounds it. And no matter how many oligarchs may still be sent to jail, this genie can no longer be put back into the bottle.

“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers”, wrote two men much wiser and more bearded than I. “But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons: the proletarians”.

It looks as though this point might apply equally to Putin’s economic policies, as the Pikalevo effect goes viral.

According to Tatiana Ivanova of Finans Magazine and Paul Goble in the Moscow Times, “a group of workers at a factory in Sverdlovsk region have taken this protest movement a step further: They have formed a council to oversee the financial operations in the hopes of recovering back wages, boosting the factory’s sales and saving their jobs in the face of what they say is an indifferent group of owners”.

And in an unexpected twist, the local authorities are supporting this worker takeover at the Baranichi Electro-Mechanical Factory, fearing a repeat of Putin’s wrath lest they do nothing.

In this way, not only have Putin’s economic policies produced thousands of potential ‘grave-diggers’ in the form of unemployed factory workers all over Russia, but Putin’s political actions to deal with the problem: empower the workers at the expense of management, may actually spur them to act against the state as well.

As Goble writes, “moves like the ones the Baranichi workers have taken, a syndicalist nationalization from below as it were, could endanger the Russian powers that be, especially if the workers, having gained this form of economic influence, try to convert it into political power”.

But while it was easy to take care of one uppity businessman who tried to convert his economic clout into political power, the Kremlin might have a harder time dealing with thousands of workers doing the same.

“It might seem impolitic to embrace what many regard as a looming global catastrophe. But this has not stopped the Russians”.

So begins an article in the Abu Dhabi based National about the future of my arctic hometown of Murmansk in the age of global warming.

Feted in Soviet times as the largest populated point beyond the Arctic Circle in the world, by the early 90s, it became clear why the decadent West was content to let the USSR keep that distinction unchallenged: it is next to impossible to adequately meet the needs of a polar city of nearly half a million inhabitants without a great deal of expense and difficulty.

The new government, itself bankrupt, no longer felt that Murmansk’s Guiness World Record spot merited maintaing the huge pay hikes, subsidies and food-supply chains that led people there in the first place.  And with the main employer, the former Soviet crown jewel that was the Murmansk Trawler Fleet, privatised out of existence, the city’s hardy inhabitants have lately been forced to lead a rather precarious existence.

But just when they thought things couldn’t get much worse, it appears that global warming may shortly finish off the last townsfolk still standing.

After all, keeping in mind JG Ballard’s apocalyptic global-warming novel The Drowned World, what other than total disaster could befall a town just 1100 kilometres from the North Pole, the gradual melting of which is turning the ice caps into a giant wall of rising water?

How about a renaissance?

That’s right: according to The National, authorities seem to be embracing global warming with a mixture of bravado and devil-may-care foolhardiness that has served the Russian people so well in the past.

“Our scientists say that the Arctic Circle is melting,” Andrei Seryakov, the deputy mayor of Murmansk, said in an interview [with The National] at his office in city hall, on Ulitsa Lenina. “But, really, we don’t see it, and I can say that this is not something that we think about. This is not something that is happening now.”

There is some evidence that a reduction in ice on Russia’s northern flank would open up lucrative commercial routes between Europe and Asia, and that increased temperatures would mean energy savings.

My parents would also become much happier if summer temperatures rise above the current max of around 12C.

Another reason is  that “for the Russians, who regard the Arctic as essentially their rightful territory, shrinking ice floes will ease access to the bounty of natural resources around the polar ice cap, including large reserves of oil, gas, gold, diamonds, nickel and tungsten”.

Yet despite appealing to common sense (and procrastination), this understanding that the melting of ice would make it easier to extract minerals is a profoundly misleading one.

According to a 2007 report by Bremen’s Forschungsstelle Osteuropa and the Center for Security Studies in Zürich, “Climate change could make it more expensive to extract oil and natural gas from current and future sites in Russia, [and] the melting of the permafrost, in particular, will impose a wide variety of costs”.

In fact, the researchers show that not only has “the thawing of ice-rich discontinuous permafrost already damaged houses, roads, airports, pipelines, and military installations”, it “is likely to increase the costs of natural gas and oil extraction in the very parts of Siberia where extraction is already expensive today”.

The myth of the bounties of global warming is just another alibi for a government determined to do virtually nothing to stop climate change.

Unfortunately, Russia’s vast current natural gas reserves make the price of doing something about global warming higher than the short term costs of doing nothing at all.

Add to that the country’s deep cultural attachment to idleness (a Russian saying goes, “work is not a wolf, it will not run away into the woods”) as well as an almost entirely absent environmental controls, and in a few decades you’ll have a scenario Ballard would have been truly proud of.

Most English-speaking readers didn’t know about Ingushetia until this morning, when its president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov miraculously and barely survived a massive suicide bomb that nearly levelled a whole city block (lending added weight, if any were needed, to Russian officials’ traffic aversion).

The headline grabbing stunt, on the anniversary of a bloody 2004 raid on Russian forces, capped off months of political violence in the semi-autonomous republic that borders Chechnya.

All the signs - the suicide nature of the bomb, the symbolic date - point to the work of Islamic extremists operating out of Chechnya.

But as with most things in Russia, the obvious answer may not be what it seems.

For a start, Moscow had recently appointed Yevkurov, a brave and principled man, to replace a hated former hardline KGB general who had failed to pacify the republic.  But rather than crack down on ‘militants’ (read: any young males you can get your hands on), Yevkurov chose a different path.

He increased goodwill by actually relaxing the draconian and racist round-ups, or ‘chistkas’, while training his sights on corruption instead. This was very smart policy because greedy officials can do more damage than actual militants; from blowing up airplanes to besieging Beslan. And as Yulia Latynina writes, it was common knowledge that Ingush officials up to the highest levels were on the take.

Indeed, the Saudi paper Arab News compared the violence against Yevkurov to Colombian and Mexican drug gangs: “He has made strides in fighting corruption and tackling the economic mess he found and it is difficult not to believe that he did not make enemies in doing so…As in those two countries, there are people in Ingushetia who are not afraid to strike at the heart of the state to keep things as they are”.

Russia’s Audit Chamber chief Sergei Stepashin openly speculated that it was Yevkurov’s anti-corruption drive had prompted the attempt on his life.

Anywhere in Russia, fighting corruption is a potentially fatal undertaking: crusading officials and journalists are routinely targeted more for their whistleblowing than their politics. All things considered, with “a brain concussion, a ruptured liver, a torn lung, several broken ribs and a damaged knee”, Yevkurov got off lightly compared to Judge Aza Gazgireyeva, assassinated earlier this month in front of her kids. However, he remains fighting for his life at a top Moscow hospital, and it is not yet clear that he will make it.

How ironic that even in the Caucasus, what gets you nearly killed is not being a Kremlin appointed ‘Quisling’ at the heart of an Islamist insurgency, but daring to clean up your own local government.

Amidst all the media intoxication with the Iran protests, you can count on Russia to deliver a well-advised downer. Sean at Sean’s Russia Blog helpfully provides a digested read of the press reactions to the post-election unrest.

“Iran”, Sean writes, “only highlights the nadir of political change in Russia.  “Perhaps,” Kolesnikov writes, “one of the few comparatively poor states, where a catch-up revolution is now impossible by force of the shapelessness of political protest is Russia.  Our political revolutions occur in kitchens and social salons.  And protest continues to be purely social, and Pikalevo-like.”

“Perhaps this is why the Russian press lacks the adulation that one finds in the Anglo press.   Whereas the American politicos see an Iran budding into a potential Persian America, the Russians are more pessimistic and emphasize the limits of political change; limits which undoubtedly stem from their own historical experience with “revolutions.”

Worth reading also is the comments thread that follows the post:

1. Chris Von Doom on June 19, 2009 10:44 am

   “Russia liberals, of course, are asking similar questions along similar lines. “Why isn’t Russia Iran?” asks Alexander Golts.”

   How about, “the Russian government enjoys popular legitimacy, whereas the Iranian government (apparently) does not”?

   Isn’t green the color of jihad? Has no one noticed this?

2. Sean on June 19, 2009 11:05 am

   How about, “the Russian government enjoys popular legitimacy, whereas the Iranian government (apparently) does not”?

   You know as well as I do that Russian liberals don’t accept this. They believe that popular opinion is always manipulated, the polls that show the popularity of the government as fixed, and their voices repressed. This is the only way they can explain why they, as the righteous, are not adored by the people. My suspicion is that Iran makes them even more miserable.

Amidst the economic collapse, something is blooming in Russia: Potatoes!

In yet another unmissable tidbit of post-Soviet life from Laurie Taylor’s excellent Thinking Allowed show on BBC Radio 4, he interviews a Syracuse university professor who claims that a boom in potato cultivation since 1991 reflects Russia’s spiralling poverty and social stratification since the collapse of Communism.

According to the show’s blurb,

The potato, with just a little bit of milk, can provide all of the nutrients necessary to sustain human life. Its wonderful productivity and the fact that it can be grown in small family plots in urban and rural areas means that, according to Professor Nancy Ries, it provides subsistence when local economies fail and other sources of food disappear.

This fact more than any other explains why Russia, the home of the vast collective wheat farm, increasingly relies on the potato. Nearly half of all agricultural production in the country is potatoes and 90 per cent of that is in small family plots. Is the potato a tool of oppression? Does it perpetuate poverty? Laurie Taylor is joined by Professor Ries and by John Reader, author of The Untold History of the Potato.

The last time there was a potato boom in Russia was during WWII, when the government gave people plots to grow them on.

It’s a form of self-reliance in financial hard times.

In fact, one of the fastest growing fast food chains in Russia is a jacket potato chain!

Also, potato growing is the opium of the people: it takes them out of the cities in the summer and makes them less susceptible to revolt!

Perhaps that is a stretch, but certainly the self-sufficiency inherent in potato cultivation can lead to to a sort of creeping political alienation, a digging in and dropping out.

Or perhaps potatoes just go really well with MAYONNAISE!

Why would a shrewd Russian oligarch want to buy two notoriously loss making English newspapers? According to billionaire Alexander Lebedev, it was his fond memories of scouring the London dailies for information as a young Soviet spy, as well as being a “good way to waste money”. But really he just wanted to hang out with JK Rowling.

Now that he has already purchased the centre-right Evening Standard, the ‘oligarch with a social conscience’ is set any day now to close the deal on the Independent, a centre left-liberal broadsheet much closer to his champagne-socialist tastes: Lebedev blogs under the name Capitalist-Idealist.

But who is he and what does this all mean?

Unlike other oligarchs, he is not close to the Kremlin (while never doing anything Khodorkovskian to inspire their full rage). He has run on a reformist platform in the controversial Sochi elections only to have his candidacy thrown out by the authories.

Despite his KGB ties Levedev’s unabashed anglophilia has made him more welcome in London than the other oligarchs who have been playing real-life Monopoly in the English capital.

That was a very superficial analysis, and I will now do more homework on this guy.

But I leave you with this pricelessly disconcerting series of photos published in today’s Guardian featuring Lebedev and his bearded, seemingly taxidermic son surrealistically hobnobbing with JK Rowling, Gorbachev, Sophie Dahl and the Prime Minister’s wife.

Note to  Russian war reporters returning to Moscow after dodging bullets in Chechnya: keep those flak jackets on!

According to the latest report by The International Union of Journalists,  “Moscow is the most dangerous place for journalists in Russia, even more than in relatively unsafe regions like Chechnya”.

And with 312 journalist deaths since 1991, Russia has become Europe’s most lethal reporting beat (by contrast, the UK had 1 death, and Italy and France none).

But contrary to the pervasive media narrative about the Putin regime’s targeting of journalists, the report notes improvements over the 1990s - the very years during which much of the West was fawning over ‘democrat’ Boris Yeltsin.

In its words, “the total impunity that existed for killers of journalists until 1997 has gradually receded and…an increasing number of investigations have led to prosecutions…The ten cases brought to trial of journalists killed for their work since 1997 saw a 50 per cent conviction rate. Of these, however, only two led to the jailing of all those responsible for the murder”.

Indeed, while 19 journalists “were clearly murdered for their journalism and another 19 cases reveal strong evidence to suggest they were also killed for their work”, the real problem lies less with state assassinations of reporters and more with the fact that “the masterminds of attacks on journalists [, whoever they are,] are getting away with murder”.

These findings prove what this blog has written before: that contrary to being seen  as serious threats to the state, Russian journalists’ lives are simply considered cheap enough to dispense with at the slightest provocation. So that’s alright then!