Call me Miss Congeniality, but my brittle European sensibilities were flummoxed by the sheer boorishness of the anti-Russia vitriol in last night's McCain-Obama match.

Setting aside the painful hypocrisy inherent, in the words of one BBC commenter, in “the irony of two men castigating Russia for unnacceptable petrodollar muscleflexing and interfering in other nations affairs while debating the best tactic for deploying US troops abroad…” the whole thing was very unbecoming.

I understand that this was a foreign policy debate and US-Russian relations have been rocked by the Georgian war; indeed, I was expecting plenty of oblique references to the event, and a healthy dose of sardonic swipes at the resurgent Eastern European power.

Perhaps something along the lines of Putin's speech in 2006, the last Russian-American low point, in which he compared America to a wolf.

However, that speech, full of “veiled references” and “apparent jibes”, and billed by most Western newspapers as just about the most aggressive, jingoist and nationalistic in human history, now feels SOOOO totally tame!

It seems that comic-book villification has become an essential precondition for American campaigning.

In a sense, ritualistic bluster, the American equivalent of Soviet-speak, is its own political lexicon: vocabulary, rather than content. Using respectful language regarding rival powers is no longer allowed; thus, just as any argument in official Soviet circles had to be advanced in Marxist-Leninist terms, so too now must any US foreign policy argument - no matter how conciliatory and benign - be couched in angry jingoism.

Once upon a time, Kremlinologists had to parse through pages and pages of nearly identical speeches extolling the virtues of Lenin and Marx before they could read between the lines and unearth the sometimes very different meanings that lay beneath.

Who knew that these tactics would have to be applied in America c. 2008?

Depressing, yes; but also necessary, because on the face of it, McCain's and Obama's positions on Russia seemed identical: analysts concluded that “both criticized Russia's invasion of Georgia and said Georgia and Ukraine should be free to join NATO”, and the two agreed on Iran, Russia and the U.S. financial crisis.

After all, it was Obama who was the sole candidate to refer to Russia as a ‘rogue state’.

However, these lexically similar declarations betray significantly divergent policy aims.

Compare and contrast some of the assertions below:

Obama: “Russia is a threat to the peace and stability of the region. Their actions in Georgia were unacceptable”.

McCain: “Russia committed serious aggression against Georgia. And Russia has now become a nation fueled by petro-dollars that is basically a KGB apparatchik-run government. I looked into Mr. Putin's eyes, and I saw three letters, a “K,” a “G,” and a “B.” And their aggression in Georgia is not acceptable behavior”.

Sound fairly similar, non?

However, the devil is in the follow-ups. Obama later makes a very clear distinction between US support for Eastern Europe, “the Estonians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Poles, the Czechs”, who “are members of NATO”, and Ukraine and Georgia, who are not.

This is something that McCain emphatically does not.

McCain: “I think the Russians ought to understand that we will support — we, the United States — will support the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in the natural process, inclusion into NATO”.

Here's Obama's take:

Obama: “To countries like Georgia and the Ukraine, I think we have to insist that they are free to join NATO if they meet the requirements, and they should have a membership action plan immediately to start bringing them in”.

While both McCain and Obama support Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine, Obama includes the key proviso of “if they meet the requirements”; those requirements could include having full territorial control, for example,which Georgia would not currently be able to meet.

And how did they fare meting out threats of a new cold war?
McCain:

I don't believe we’re going to go back to the Cold War. I am sure that that will not happen. But I do believe that we need to bolster our friends and allies.

Translation: “We don't want a cold war; just a hardened division of Europe into two sides - us and the Russkie bastards”.

Obama:

Now, we also can't return to a Cold War posture with respect to Russia. It's important that we recognize there are going to be some areas of common interest.

Translation: “Despite all my obligatory bullish rhetoric earlier on, I am not interested in a cold war, but rather in an aggressive engagement based on common ground and national interest, including Iran, energy and nuclear non-proliferation”.

I have written much about how McCain has been comprehensively wrong on Russia from the start; no-where more so than in his hot headed and ignorant knee-jerk reaction to the Georgia conflict that singularly failed to address Georgian complicity in the outbreak of the violence.

Yet, he somehow managed to cast Obama's reasonable and sane call for “restraint from both sides” as “naive”.

The scariest part of it all is that the pundits overwhelmingly applauded McCain's jingoistic Russia-bashing, and it didn't all come from the right, either!

While the neoconservative Heritage Foundation's Nile Gardiner could be expected to wax lyrical about McCain's  “swagger and aggression”, I was very surprised to see the sentiments echoed by the latte-liberal Guardian's Michael Tomasky: “McCain probably won the Russia conversation”.

In the end, the BBC sums it up nicely:

“Mr McCain was able to describe meeting Vladimir Putin, “looking into his eyes and seeing three letters, K, G and B” - a reference to the old Soviet intelligence agency for which Mr Putin once worked.

Does it sound corny to foreign ears, with a slight B-movie flavour to it? It probably does”.

So there you have it: superpower presidential elections as B-Movie casting calls.

Be afraid, be very afraid…

–by Vadim Nikitin

 

47% of percent of my graduating class entered the financial sector. Of those, 100% of the Russian speakers I knew, from all over the CIS, seemed to have joined Lehman Brothers.

Not without a bit of old fashioned Soviet cronyism, mind you (you can take the Sovok out of the USSR…).

Sergei, my first year mentor (an older student assigned to international freshmen as a sort of guide), a precocious mathematician, was head-hunted by Lehman in the spring of his senior year. They even threw in a several thousand dollar re-location package to soften the U-Haul ride down to New York.

The minute he was hired, Sergei, like countless immigrants before him, set about bringing over as many from ‘back home’ as he could (except me, whom he suspected of ideological unreliability).

Of course, these imminent i-bankers first had to get through the so called H1-B lottery: the random annual allocation of business visas.

Those who did not get the visa had to spend a year of purgatory at a Lehman branch overseas, often in London or on the continent, or even in their home countries, and wait to be let in the following year.

The reason that I am writing is because these Lehman types represented the third wave of Russia's brain drain. The first began in the 1970s when restrictions on Jewish immigration were lifted. The second, which took place in the 1990s, saw over 1 million of the best educated men and women go West.

What was so new about this particular brain drain, however, was that a distinctly vocational element had become added to the purely geographic one. The former Soviet Union's brightest were no longer just emigrating to Queens, or even Tribeca; no, this was also internal exile, exile even for those who had stayed put in Moscow or Piter, exile from the research institutes of their parents’ time and into Finance.

Why this trip down memory lane?

I was reminded of my old classmates by the appearance of a Livejournal article that has been lighting up the Russian internet this week.

"The Group Interest of the Intelligentsia", by someone called Lyubu, has been heading the Yandex (Russia's big search site) charts and even got picked up by the high circulation tabloid Argumenti I Fakty.

The article itself was a disappointment: a tired rehash, by self-styled online intellectuals, of the age-old lament that "Our intelligentsia has all fled to the West, or sold out!"

A much more articulate, nuanced and provocative view recently appeared in the Economist. Entitled "The Hand That Feeds Them", the piece explored the dwindling relevance of the intelligentsia in post-Soviet Russia, citing a recent poll in which 79% of Russians considered the intelligentsia to have little or no influence on life.

For all its authoritarian regression, notes the Economist, Russia today is a much freer place than the USSR. "However undemocratic it may be, it is not a totalitarian state. The room for honest speaking is far greater than Russian intellectuals make use of. As Marietta Chudakova, a historian of Russian literature and courageous public figure, puts it, "Nobody has been commanded to lie down‚ and everyone is already on the ground." The media is suffocated by self-censorship more than by the Kremlin's pressure".

In his stark and rebellious manifesto, My Fascism, the poet and activist Kirill Medvedev touches on the origins of some of this intellectual conformist. He writes: "Our national cultural consciousness is a half-Soviet, half-bourgeois swamp, in which rot the decomposing bodies of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Joseph Stalin, Alla Pugacheva and Jesus Christ".

In such an environment, the liberal intelligentsia has long ceased to exist: "The journalists and politicians among them, the lords of ideas at the start of the 90s, became essentially ordinary people with ordinary strengths and foibles, who decided that they now lived in a normal country and could live how they please. (Maybe that's how it should be, but not in Russia, because Russia has not become a "normal' country).

All well and good, but just how is all this relevant to the financial collapse?

As I write, many of my Russophone classmates have long since cleared their cubicles. More scarily, that might also mean a revocation of their visas (which are specific to place of employment) and a de-facto deportation; to Poland or Latvia if they're lucky, the Tajik National Army if they are less so.

Back in the USSR, the intelligentsia was composed of "a large number of educated, intelligent and underemployed people in their 30s and 40s with little prospect of moving up the career ladder provided a perfect milieu for brewing liberal ideas. With time, they formed a political class".

However, in recent years, and especially during the third brain drain, this very demographic has been disproportionally engaged in investment banking and consulting. They have always been educated and intelligent.

But only now, with the implosion of the financial system, have they suddenly also become underemployed and lacking career prospects.

Like the haggard, landless soldiers of the Russian army returning home en masse from the Eastern Front and paving the way for the Bolshevik Revolution, this new wave of repatriating failed bankers threatens to unleash another powerful social transformation: the resurrection of the Intelligentsia.

If what Sergei Bulgakov wrote in 1909 still holds, that "Russia cannot renew itself without renewing, among other things, its intelligentsia", then the banking crash may have just shown its silver lining.

–by Vadim Nikitin

Ahhh! That's better!

NOW FOR THE RUSSIA NEWS ROUNDUP!

1) Not to gloat or anything, but it seems the Brookings Institution has finally started reading FPA Russia Blog. Only a few days after we exposed the absurdity of Anders Aslund's disingenuous insinuation that Russia's economic downturn was somehow caused by the Georgia war, their Clifford G Gaddy has pronounced the definitive word on the matter, blasting Aslund out of the water. Good job!

2) Russia is everywhere in the headlines!

The BBC's Bridget Kendall delves into the “Machiavellian power struggles, dark paranoia of security chiefs and long fingers of corruption” to explore the strange co-leadership of Putin and Medvedev.

3)  Guardian hack Luke Harding asks whether, after Ossetia and Abkhazia, Ukrainian penninsula of Crimea is next. This is very, very unlikely.

4.  Very interesting article in the Washington Post by Philip Pan, about how Putin admonished Ekho Moskvy, one of the last remaining liberal indepenent media outlets, for alleged pro-Georgian bias in the reporting. This has got them all very worried. Hopefully it will not result in their shut down.

5.  Speaking of media bias: is CNN about to be kicked out of Russia?

Exiledonline has an equally disturbing story about how CNN taped a long exclusive interview with Putin, but only aired a few seconds worth of clips. The reason? Putin came across as too reasonable, says author Yasha Levine, and this wouldn't have gelled with the Putin-as-Bad Guy construct over at Time Warner. And now, he's apparently so pissed at this ‘censorship’ that he is considering kicking the whole channel out of his country.  Totally un-ironically, too!

 

Having despatched his women vote, has Sarah Palin taken the fight to Obama's core demographic of pot-smoking hippie homosexual intellectuals?

Compare and contrast Palin's recent interview with Charlie Gibson, in which she rails against a new cold war with Russia while refusing to rule out a hot one, and Allen Ginsberg's poem ‘America‘, in which he rails against bourgeois hypocrisy while refusing to say the Lord's prayer:

Sarah Palin, ABC World News Tonight, September 11, 2008:

My mind is made up, there's going to be trouble…

America it's them bad Russians

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians

The Russians are power mad. The Russia wants to eat us alive. She wants to take

Our cars from out our garages

Her wants to take our factories

Her wants to corrupt our college girls

Her wants to put us all in slave labour camps

Her wants to emaciate us like skeletons

Her wants Malenkov or Bulganin or somebody to be our boss.

Her wants to dictify us.

Him big bureaucracy running our filling stations

That no good. Ugh.

 

Allen Ginsberg, America:

We’ve got to keep an eye on Russia.

For Russia to have exerted such pressure

in terms of invading

a smaller democratic country, unprovoked

is unacceptable and we have to keep…

we have got to keep our eyes on Russia,

under the leadership there.

I think it was unfortunate.

some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken

away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.

That's why

we have to keep an eye on Russia.

Russia.

They are our next door neighbors.

They are our next door neighbor.

We will not repeat a Cold War.

We cannot repeat the Cold War.

We are thankful that, under Reagan,

we won the Cold War,

without a shot fired, also.

We will not repeat a Cold War.

—

To use Ginsberg-Palin's own words, “Are you being sinister, or is this some sort of practical joke? America, this is quite serious… America, is this correct?”

–by Vadim Nikitin

 

…I'd rather
compose
romances for you -
more profit in it
and more charm.

                                                        –V.V Mayakovsky

I am sick of this whole Georgia thing.

I’ve had enough of politics, international relations, diplomatic intrigue!

I hate how news has to be about events.

Who cares about events?

When was the last time an event even happened to you or anyone you know?

I don't know about you, but nothing ever happens to me. Does that make me a dull boy?  I mean, aren't all events, with a capital E, imaginary, anyway?

So from now on, I’m just going to put up links to interesting events stories and and as long a description/summation as I can stomach before vomiting over the keyboard.

For example:

1. Starting this week, The Economist is debating the West's response to renewed Russian assertiveness for two-weeks as part of an ongoing, Oxford-style Online Debate Series. The proposition is, "This house believes the West must be bolder in its response to a newly assertive Russia."

It involves Dmitry Trenin and Marshall Goldman, a professor I greatly respect for his honest and indignant account of privatisation in his book The Piratisation of Russia. The debate promises to be lively and intriguing!

As of now, 53% to 47% disagree that the west should be bolder! Go fellow travellers!!

2. In today's Moscow Times, Harvard's Joseph Nye pens a clear-headed analysis contrasting Chinese soft power during the Olympics with Russia's hard power in Georgia.

Without jumping to conclusions or offering reflexive condemnation of Russia's fisticuffs, Nye observes that the most effective foreign policy strategy artfully weaves soft and hard power.

3. A lot has been written about Russia's stock market plunge. Especially flimsy, not to mention disingenuous, were the shyster-economist Anders Aslund's attempts to link the recent economic troubles to the war in Georgia.

There are myriad reasons not to respect Aslund; this article adds yet another drop to his overflowing chalice of intellectual dishonesty and increasing irrelevance.

Here is the sensational way his article begins:

Aug. 8 stands out as a fateful day for Russia. It marks Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's greatest strategic blunder. In one blow, he wiped out half a trillion dollars of stock market value, stalled all domestic reforms and isolated Russia from the outside world.

Anders is himself clearly aware of the improbability that a Russian person could ever accomplish that much in a single day before succombing to drink, fatigue or the oppresive weight of the human predicament, because he never re-visits this bizarre claim.

When he finally gets down to a bullet point list of reasons for Russia's economic ills, the Georgia war doesn't get a single mention; its inclusion in the lead paragraph was purely for cheap titillation.

Incidentally, the points themselves were mostly sensible and apolitical, and reveal a half-decent, if supply-side, economist groaning from underneath all that reactionary, Russophobic trash-talk.

In a measured and grown up article about the credit crisis, the FT's Charles Clover and Catherine Belton note Medvedev's unprecedented injection of $10 bn into the banking system:

“The market hasn't reacted to Medvedev's comments. However, [it] should,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital, the investment bank.

He said the president's comments may signal fresh investor-friendly policies, but were chiefly a “charm offensive”. He added: “This is the first time in history that the Kremlin has reached out to the investor community. It is fairly unprecedented.”

4.  Some have been making hysterical noises about Russia's military exercises with Venezuela. Instead, might I suggest listening to the Pentagon itself:

“We exercise all around the globe and have joint exercises with countries all over the world. So do many other nations,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

STOP!!! I CAN't HOLD IT ANYMORE… BAAAAARF!

I’ll leave you with a nice short story:

An Encounter

by Daniil Kharms

On one occasion a man went off to work and on the way he met another man who, having bought a loaf of Polish bread, was going his way home.

 

And that's just about all there is to it.

—

–by Vadim Nikitin

 

 

Dans le monde réellement renversé, le vrai est un moment du faux

(In a world which really is topsy-turvy, the true is a moment of the false)

-Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

Every so often comes an event so bizarre that it provides a lucid glimpse into the dark inner workings of everyday life, usually obscured by their very banality.

In art, the Russian formalist Shklovsky pronounced such a technique ostranenie, or ‘making strange’; Brecht called it Verfremdungseffekt - the ‘distancing effect’.

Of course, in modern Russia's looking glass world, truth is stranger than literary theory.

Thus it was that on August 29 , in front of a live audience on Russian state TV, a trashy talk show called The Phenomenon (Fenomen) laid bare the device.

The premise of the programme was  simple enough.  Alexander, a TV magician badly impersonating Hercule Poirot, accompanied by fugitive spoon-bending fraudster Geller, uses audience interaction to ‘compose’ a murder mystery, on live TV, that he had already written and placed in a safe.

He picks three members of the audience, each of whom contributes a word as he attempts to ‘psychically manipulate’ their replies so that they match his narrative. Each of the said words is written down on a blackboard by another audience member.

The magician calls on a young woman and asks her for her favourite kitchen utensil; she says, ‘knife’.

(Man on stage writes K-N-I-F-E on blackboard)

He then asks a football hooligan-looking man which place he’d most like to travel to; man replies, “Munich”.

(M-U-N-I-C-H)

Finally, he prompts a third member of the audience to name a celebrity who was not in the room. After some initial hesitation, the man cries, “Putin!”

What followed could have been an exquisite corpse composition written by Dario Fo, Brecht and Daniil Kharms:

The man on the stage hesitates. Nervous laughter buzzes through the hall. “Alexander, should I write it?” asks the man, shaking his quavering marker over the board.

“Write it: Pu-tin” replies the presenter.

P-U-T-I-N is obediently inscribed, thus completing the cryptic trilogy of

KNIFE
MUNICH
PUTIN

on the blackboard.

Immediately, the hitherto unseen presenter of the show, clearly agitated,  jumps on stage to announce:

“Right, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to replace that name. I’ve been informed that it needs to be changed. Try again”. And exits.

From off stage, he continues:

“It's just not appropriate”

The magician begins to mumble something to the effect of, “I think that” when he is interrupted by the voice of the presenter : “I think that the management…”. Before he could finish, magician interjects: “I was thinking only of the first name! [to man at blackboard]: Why don't you write just the first name. Erase it, please”.

Blackboard man: Give me something to erase it with!

He looks around the board, in bewilderment, for an eraser.

He can't find one.

Magician: Just write below the name that's there.

B-M: Of that same person?

M: Yes.

Disembodied voice of presenter: Let's…uh, could you please erase the surname. Everyone here is getting nervous. Let's just erase it and start again.

He comes back on stage, even more briskly.

B-M: there's nothing to erase it with!
Presenter: Can we get the assistants to help erase this, please?

A girl enters, attempts to vigorously rub out the word “PUTIN”.

Presenter: [to audience] “You see, live broadcasts are never without unexpected moments!”

Girl can't get the name to go away.

Presenter: Just add it underneath, then! [storms off].

Magician: Can we write the first name?

Presenter [off stage]: Yes, of course, of course. Write just the name, not the surname.

[B-M is seen scrawling V-L-A-D-I-M-I-R  underneath "Putin".

Presenter: Excellent.

Magician: Now I can ask the audience to sit down. Knife, Munich…Vladimir. A strange set, but I think nothing extraordinary.

After this, audience correctly guesses the time of the ‘crime’ (6:30) to finish the narrative. Magician opens safe with manuscript to reveal that his original plot does indeed involve a stabbing committed by a Vladimir in Munich at 6:30. Uri Geller compliments Magician.

Fin.

I first read about this incident in an article by Oleg Kozyrev in Grani.ru, an independent newspaper.

In his Swiftian piece, Kozyrev focuses on the absurdist image of a girl frantically and ultimately unsuccessfully rubbing out Putin's name in front of a national audience.

Viewers “were expecting light entertainment”, he writes. “Instead, the prime minister's name had to be rubbed out in front of millions of their countrymen, who were doubtless thinking: what happened in Munich, anyway?

“And why are they rubbing Putin?

“That was the day I began to respect Uri Geller. Say what you will, but the whole country saw these people bend over. Just because of one name. From the mention of just one name, they bent like no aluminium spoon ever could.

“I don't believe that the state of the country has anything to do with it. It was just a Phenomenon”.

Of course, we know exactly what happened in Munich, exactly 73 years and 11 months before the show aired.

Moreover, despite the apparent consternation of Magician, Presenter and audience, Russia's current media climate makes the spontaneity of what transpired on stage inconceivable.

There is no way that the show would have remained on the air for even a second longer had the management really been nervous about its proceedings. No one at home would have batted an eyelid; after all, Russian TV brims with technical difficulties.

Which leads inevitably to ask: why did it occur?

Who had written the script, and who was its real intended audience?

Why did state television consider it necessary to show the words “Knife”, “Munich” and “Putin, Vladimir” together on a blackboard for minutes of airtime, the memory of which would be reinforced further by the manufactured commotion/controversy?

The possibilities are tantalising.

1. We have a strong visual of a young girl trying unsuccessfully to erase Vladimir Putin's name.

Was this a message to the young Medvedev? ie. “if you’re getting any ideas, drop them right now! You couldn't rub me out, even if you tried”.

2. We have a TV presenter publicly censoring his own show, saying that Putin's name is inappropriate and that ‘management’ are ‘getting nervous’, without any attempt to hide it.

Was this a staged show of force to the media, and the public, that the state emphatically reserves the right to control what is shown on TV?

Was it an FYI to journalists that Putin's name is now officially out of bounds?

3. We have an undeniable reference to Hitler's night of the long knives, the ruthless and surprise purge, on June 30th 1934, of the SA storm troopers led by Ernst Rohm.

Was it yet another signal to the West that Russia is prepared to attack Poland and the Czech Republic over the US missile defence shield?

Was it a threat to Nashi, the crypto-paramilitary youth organisation headed by Vasili Yakemenko? (That seems unlikely, as Nashi are already looking like a spent force, and Yakemenko harbours little ambition).

Was it another 'subtle’ piece of advice for Medvedev, whose personal proximity to Putin strongly parallels that of Rohm to Hitler, to remember his place?

Was it, like the Night of the Long Knives, an announcement of the return of extra-judicial killings at the highest level?

A premonition of a ruthless cabinet purge, or even Putin's return to the presidency?

Only Uri Geller knows for certain.

 

 

In his hysterical editorial in today's Guardian, Edward Lucas calls Russia “deeply corrupt and lawless”.

Unfortunately, exactly the opposite is true: Russia is so saturated with laws and its legal system so harsh that “more than one in 10 of the country's citizens have been convicted of crimes over the past 15 years“, reports the Moscow Times, quoting a retired Supreme Court judge.

Maybe it's true what all those cold warriors said about never trusting a Russian: after all, there's a 10% chance that he's a felon!

Moreover, contrary to the view that Russia is heading in “the wrong direction” and moving away from the West, the country is actually on track to match America, at least in terms of police efficiency:

In the US, more than 30% of the population are estimated to have a criminal record.

Forget great power rivalry and Eastern European geopolitics: the new cold war competition is unfolding in exactly this sphere.

While the US continues to “incarcerate more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars…and [remains] the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people)”, Russia is not far behind and rapidly closing the gap (628 per 100,000).

We will bury you yet!

 

Whatever one thinks of his foppish red socks or penchant for Prime Ministerial underwear,  famous Iraq whistleblower Sir Christopher Meyer is a sound chap when it comes to foreign policy.

So when the UK's former ambassador to the US writes that “a return to 1815 is the way forward for Europe: the Congress of Vienna divided the continent into spheres of influence[and] similar rules are needed for the 21st century”, we should listen.

His provocative essay, published in the Times, argues that globalisation and the end of the cold war have actually strengthened nationalism around the world:

It is useless to say that nationalism and ethnic tribalism have no place in the international relations of the 21st century. If anything the spread of Western-style democracy has amplified their appeal and resonance.

He issues a stinging rebuke to the now fashionable conception of the national interest, and spheres of interest, as anachronistic. Speaking of Russia and Iran, Meyer states:

You don't have to like or approve of these regimes. But not to understand their histories is not to understand the mainspring of their external policies - in Russia's case its determination to rebuild its greatness, dismantled, as millions of Russians see it, by Mikhail Gorbachev and his Georgian Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, aided and abetted by the West.

I would bet a sackful of roubles that Russian foreign policy would not be one jot different if it were a fully functioning democracy of the kind that we appear keen to spread around the globe.

This last passage is so important because it pierces the misguided notion of ideological primacy in international relations so peddled by the Bush and Blair administrations. Whether a regime is democratic or not ultimately bears little relation to its definition of geopolitical self-interest.

Sir Chris calls on “Russia and the West…to draw up rules of the road for the 21st century” similar ot the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Something similar is needed today, based again on spheres of influence. Nato must renounce the provocative folly of being open to Georgian or, worse, Ukrainian membership. This strikes at the heart of the Russian national interest and offers no enhanced security to either Tbilisi or Kiev. As for Russia, it must be made unambiguously clear where any revanchist lunge westwards would provoke a military response by Nato.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

 

In a refreshing turn of events, Vladimir Putin has reportedly saved the lives of several journalists during a trip to a Siberian conservation area for the endangered Amur tiger (in accordance with the Lomonosov-Lavoisier Law of Conservation of Media, an opposition website owner in secessionist Ingushetia was ordered killed shortly afterwards).

When a tiger escaped from a trap and ran in the direction of the press pack, Putin is said to have shot it with a tranquiliser gun. Then, in a clear signal to Nato and Georgia, the Prime Minister stripped down to his camouflage underwear and proceeded to tear out and eat its still beating heart.

Well, not exactly; but he might as well have done, judging by the British headlines:

“Putin shoots a tiger as Europe grapples with Russian aggression” screams the Guardian, and then asks: “Was it an openly hostile signal of power play to the west? Or just another incarnation of Putin's oft-demonstrated masculinity?”

“Vladimir Putin 'shoots’ tiger, dismisses EU leaders”, declares the Times, adding that “the Russian Prime Minister , shown in new macho-style pictures apparently tranquilising a tiger , said that any attempts at severing relations would be hampered by the self-interest of European nations”.

In fact, histrionics aside, this has been a big week for Russian diplomacy: President Medvedev spelt out the 5 principles of his new foreign policy vision. The following is the BBC's Paul Reynolds's fine summary; his article is also worth reading for its good commentary.

1. International law

“Russia recognises the primacy of the basic principles of international law, which define relations between civilised nations. It is in the framework of these principles, of this concept of international law, that we will develop our relations with other states.”

2. Multi-polar world

“The world should be multi-polar. Unipolarity is unacceptable, domination is impermissible. We cannot accept a world order in which all decisions are taken by one country, even such a serious and authoritative country as the United States of America. This kind of world is unstable and fraught with conflict.”

3. No isolation

“Russia does not want confrontation with any country; Russia has no intention of isolating itself. We will develop, as far as possible, friendly relations both with Europe and with the United State of America, as well as with other countries of the world.”

4. Protect citizens

“Our unquestionable priority is to protect the life and dignity of our citizens, wherever they are. We will also proceed from this in pursuing our foreign policy. We will also protect the interest of our business community abroad. And it should be clear to everyone that if someone makes aggressive forays, he will get a response.”

5. Spheres of influence

“Russia, just like other countries in the world, has regions where it has its privileged interests. In these regions, there are countries with which we have traditionally had friendly cordial relations, historically special relations. We will work very attentively in these regions and develop these friendly relations with these states, with our close neighbours.”

Asked if these “priority regions” were those that bordered on Russia he replied: “Certainly the regions bordering [on Russia], but not only them.”

And he stated: “As regards the future, it depends not just on us. It also depends on our friends, our partners in the international community. They have a choice.”

Of course, these postulates are nothing new. The principles of Multipolarity and the idea of Russia's Monroe Doctrine in the so-called Near Abroad (the former Soviet republics) were first advanced about a decade ago by Yevgueny Primakov. At the time, around the allied bombing of Yugoslavia, Russia made a lot of bluster regarding Nato encroachment, but couldn't deliver.  The difference is that now Russia appears for the first time able to put its tanks where its mouth is.