A Russian journalist assaulted and left for dead for exposing an abuse of power by the authorities.

The whole world knows the story of Anna Politkovskaya: a Putin opponent gunned down in the lobby of her Moscow apartment after publishing a series of articles on Russian atrocities in Chechnya.

Except this journalist is called Mikhail Beketov. And you are unlikely to hear much of his harrowing story amidst the media circus surrounding Politkovskaya's political murder trial.

Far from the glamour of Kremlin intrigue, Beketov edits the Khimki Pravda, a local newspaper in a town just outside of Moscow. Here's is what happened to him, from a report in the Moscow Times:

“Doctors were deliberating Monday evening whether to amputate the frostbitten fingers of Mikhail Beketov, a newspaper editor and environmental activist in the Moscow suburb of Khimki who was brutally assaulted and left for dead earlier this month

According to doctors, at least 24 hours passed between the attack and the time Beketov was found, his colleagues said. Doctors have already amputated his right leg”.

Why would someone do such a thing to a journalist?

Well, “Beketov, 50, was found Nov. 13 bloodied and unconscious near his home after an attack that his friends say is linked to his criticism of local authorities’ deforestation plans”.

According to the article, “the editor's brother, Mikhail Kursa, said a former police officer — now mixed up in organized crime — was being sought for carrying out the attack”.

While news of Politkovskaya's alleged killers’ trial is a major theme abroad, one of the few Western outlets to have picked up Beketov's case has been the Chicago Tribune (another is The Guardian, with Luke Harding's good report). In it, Alex Rodriguez makes a comparison between the two cases:

Politkovskaya attained fame around the world as one of the Kremlin's harshest critics, writing extensively about atrocities committed by Russian soldiers fighting Chechen separatists. Beketov toiled at the opposite end of the spectrum; the paper he published, the Khimkinskaya Pravda, was a one-man operation focusing solely on life and politics in Khimki.

Yet the vast majority of the 49 journalists who were killed in Russia since 1993 were just like Beketov: local reporters who crossed local authorities regarding small local issues in places most people have never heard of, not big name dissidents challenging the Kremlin.

Of course, the west is right to deplore and attack the culture of censorship and harassment hoisted on the press by the highest echelons of Russia's government. But fetishising figures like Politkovskaya and Paul Khlebnikov leads to a very simplistic view of Russia's lack of press freedom.

Georgia is nervously calling “for an independent investigation into who started the war between Russia and Georgia…after the New York Times and BBC's Newsnight programme raised serious doubts about Georgia's claim that its attack on the breakaway Georgian enclave of South Ossetia on August 7/8 was in response to Russian aggression”.

But it was the Amnesty International report comdemning both sides that is really significant, due to Amnesty's reputation as an impartial and respected source that rarely sides with Russia.

“The rights group said the use of notoriously inaccurate Grad rockets in the Georgian assault on Tskhinvali resulted in “scores of civilian deaths” and violated international law on the conduct of war.

Amnesty also took Moscow to task for failing to stop killings, torture and abuses against civilians perpetrated by Russia's allies ‚ the South Ossetian militias ‚ in ethnic Georgian enclaves inside the breakaway region”.

Now, in light of this joint culpability (if anything, Georgia's was active - shelling civilians 0 and Russia's passive -failing to rein in allies), the question that I asked in August remains:

Why [did] CNN care more about Russian violence in Gori than Georgian violence in Tskhinvali?

Mark Ames has some excellent hunches over at his zine Exiledonline.

This is also a perfect time to remember Barack Obama's original declaration at the start of the crisis, for which he was roundly ridiculed for being a wimp and even, in McCain's words, “bizarrely in synch with Moscow”:

“I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict,” Obama said in a statement. “Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint”.

At that time, McCain responded with these now embarassing histrionics:

"That's kind of like saying after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, that Kuwait and Iraq need to show restraint, or like saying in 1968 [when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia] … that the Czechoslovaks should show restraint," he said.

We can only hope that Americans hawks, of all political stripes, learn some lessons about the wisdom of reflexive, ill-informed bellicosity, and that Obama feels vindicated enough in his moderation to ward off similar attacks at the future US president.

 

The West may have stood by and watched Russia chop off Georgia's breakaway regions, but it prevented Putin from applying the same treatment to Mikhail Saakashvili's nether ones.

A transcript of a conversation released today shows that the embattled Georgian president, dubbed by Britain's Daily Telegraph “the man who lost it all”, came perilously close to living up this label in the most painfully literal of senses.

Nicolas Sarkozy saved the President of Georgia from being hanged "by the balls" ‚ a threat made last summer by Vladimir Putin, according to revelations from Jean-David Levitte, Mr Sarkozy's chief diplomatic adviser, to the London Times.

Putin is no stranger to toilet-threats, having once memorably declared: “If we catch [the Chechen rebels] in the toilet, we will rub them out in the outhouse.” But this particular exchange is a gem:

"I am going to hang Saakashvili by the balls," Mr Putin declared.

Mr Sarkozy thought he had misheard. "Hang him?" ‚ he asked. "Why not?" Mr Putin replied. "The Americans hanged Saddam Hussein."

Mr Sarkozy, using the familiar tu, tried to reason with him: "Yes but do you want to end up like [President] Bush?" Mr Putin was briefly lost for words, then said: "Ah ‚ you have scored a point there."

Though Sarkozy would like to be seen as the man who dissuaded Putin from conquering all of Georgia, the ultimate credit for averting major war must go to the radioactive legacy of George Bush.

(In fact, parents of the world would be wise to heed Sarko's technique: “Eat your greens/clean your room/do your homework or you’ll end up like Bush!”)

For now, Saakashvili's erm, sack, seems to be safe. However, this afternoon, “more than 10,000 opponents of President Mikheil Saakashvili rallied in Tbilisi on Friday in the first major show of discontent since Georgia's crushing defeat in an August war with Russia”, reports the Moscow News.

In addition to blaming him for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, protesters, some carrying signs saying “Stop Misha, Stop Russia” denounced his crackdowns on civil society and press freedoms.

Saakashvili should not get too comfortable: a coalition of Georgian nationalists avenging his territorial losses and liberals angered by his authoritarianism might just carry out Putin's wish themselves.

Andy from the authoritative blog Siberianlight has created an aggregator of top news and blog stories about Russia.

He insists it is better than Alltop, and because he has kindly included FPA Russia blog in his list, we’re reluctant to contradict him. Have a look for yourselves!

http://www.russiannewsonline.com/

http://www.russiannewsonline.com/russia-blogs/

Speaking of inclusion and blatant self-congratulation, FPA Russia Blog has recently been ranked at number 14 of the 50 Best Russia Blogs by the German language Russia site Krusenstern.

Loyal FPA Comrades & readers have only themselves to blame.

Exiledonline's intrepid Yasha Levine writes about an unusual protest by an anarchist group called ‘War’:

On the night of November 7, a group of them set up a laser on top of a building across the river from the Russian White House ‚ that's the place where the prime minister carries out daily his business ‚ and projected a 150-ft. wide toxic green skull and bones on its facade.

The stunt was meant to commemorate the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, with the laser beam symbolically standing in for the revolutionary signal shot fired from the Aurora cruiser.

Sound alright? What's more, the ‘War’ collective gave a menacing nod to their inspiration, Nestor Ivanovich Makhno, a brual anarcho-communist guerrilla leader turned army commander who led an independent anarchist army in the Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. Yet, that is precisely what made Levine a little sad:

This was one of those non-violent and non-confrontational attempts at political change through art. Laser art, probably to techno. It really put Russia's rich history of revolutionary violence to shame.

He may have been right about the techno; the crossbones projected on to the White House bore an uncanny resemblance to electronica musician Dan Deacon's trademark green skull.

On the other hand, is it really realistic to expect any post-1968 revolution, in Russia or anywhere else, to be un-ironically violent? It may not necessarily be that bad; the last thing we need is a return to the dour terrorism of Lenin; class war with a Calvinist work ethic.

Crystal Cat as the new Internationale, anyone?

Russia Blogs on Alltop

Billed as a "digital magazine rack" of the Internet, Alltop “helps you explore your passions by collecting stories from ‘all the top’ sites on the web”.

FPA Russia Blog now enters the rarefied salon of Russia watchers, joining the likes of Sean's Russia Blog, Timothy Post, English Russia, Siberian Light and the Moscow Times.

Thank you to all FPA Russia blog readers & Comrades who have raised the profile of this forum and helped get this seal of web approval!

What were all those funnily dressed, heavily armed chaps doing in Red Square today?

Depends who you ask.

Left wingers and old people were celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while Kremlin supporters were celebrating….a day in 1941 celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Granted, November 7th was always a confusing day to commemorate a Socialist Revolution that actually occurred in October, 1917.

But since Soviet times, when Revolution Day was the biggest holiday of the year, things have taken a turn for the utterly bizarre.

After 1991, Revolution Day ceased to be an official holiday. Yet it remained a thorn in the side of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations for continuing to attract large crowds, many of whom were communists and other regime critics.

Yeltsin tried to deal with this by creating a rival Russian Independence Day (independence from itself?),  an affair in June that, for all its very Russian absurdity, nevertheless failed to catch on.

Putin cunningly crafted Russian Unity Day for November 4, commemorating a bizarre and obscure victory over some Poles in 1612, figuring it was close enough to the original Revolution Day that no one would notice.

But the crowds stubbornly kept coming out on the 7th, a holiday whose original meaning is becoming increasingly appealing for many in the wake of the financial crisis. (Seventy-nine percent of Russians said they would welcome state regulation of prices and 58 percent felt it would be useful to nationalise big private companies).

Moreover, a growing number of people, 38 percent,  say they still see Nov. 7 as Revolution Day ‚ a 9-point increase from 2005

To counter such real memories, Putin commissioned a $12 million propaganda film about Unity Day, called 1612, to ensure that Russians “didn't regard it as something that happened in ancient history but as a recent event…that they felt the link between what happened 400 years ago and today”.
In order to drive home that link with modern Russia, the film featured unicorns. (no joke).

To add a further post-modern twist to today's proceedings: not only were the troops in Red Square marking, essentially, Revolution Day Day (Revolution Day 1941, when Stalin sent troops directly from the parade to the front), but they were also dressed in all kinds of random historical garb, for absolutely no discernable reason!!!

As a bemused Daily Telegraph hack Adrian Blomfield reports,

Many of the servicemen in the parade wore white camouflage just as their predecessors had done during the bitter winter of 1941, when many soldiers froze to death.

Earlier epochs were represented too, with some soldiers clad in the uniforms of Catherine the Great's imperial guard. They were joined by soldiers on horseback dressed in the medieval garb of the bogatyrs, fictional heroic warriors similar to Sir Gawain and the knights-errant of British legend.

Ironically, amidst all this phantasmagoria, some things never change; as an old joke from the Soviet era, about a phone in on the fictional ‘Armenian Radio’, shows:

‘Is it possible, an eager caller asks, to foretell the future? ‘Yes,’ comes the weary answer. ‘No problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.

 

“Americans Chose Perestroika” was the headline splashed across Russia's leading tabloid, the Komsomolskaya Pravda, on November 5th.

Indeed, the scenes of solidarity, jubilation and catharsis that I witnessed in downtown Washington DC  around 11pm on November 4 could have come from a documentary about the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the immediate aftermath of Ceausescu's overthrow.

Drivers honking their horns, people with flags leaning out of car windows, spontaneous hugging, drumming; truck and bus drivers and police officers stopping to fraternise with and high-five the human roadblocks: this was People Power, in all its triumph, sincerity, and naivete.

Such scenes are especially poignant for Russians, who remember, first-hand or otherwise, the Gorbachev years. Our Komsomolskaya Pravda correspondent writes:

“It is not my country, not my history, but I was over-run with goosebumps when the results were announced”.

Is it any surprise then that Gorbachev sees a glimmer of himself in the President Elect?

“I am very happy. Two or three years ago I said America needed perestroika, and this was greeted with cheers in the US,” Mr Gorbachev was quoted as saying, using the term for his 1980s liberal reforms that helped end the Cold War.

“It is no accident that the whole world followed these elections, including in Russia, where they were followed like never before. This shows there is hope that the arrival of a new administration will bring changes,” he added.

Comparisons are impossible to avoid:

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union was fighting an unwinnable war in Afghanistan, experiencing a deepening economic crisis and increasing international isolation that left it bankrupting itself still further in the arms race.

Just as in the US under Bush II, the Brezhnev years were marked by social conservatism, foreign invasions, increased domestic surveillance, crackdowns on dissidents and debt-financed lifestyles; in another eerie parallel, making fun of the apparently senile, gaffe-prone and increasingly incompetent Premier had become a national past-time.

Sample Brezhnev jokes:

Lenin showed us how to govern. Stalin showed us how not to govern. Khrushchev showed us that any fool can govern. And Brezhnev showed us that not every fool can govern.

Brezhnev called together a group of cosmonauts. ‘Comrades! The Americans have landed on the Moon. We here have consulted and have decided that you will go to the Sun!’
‘But we will burn up, Leonid Iljich!’
‘Be not afraid, comrades, the Party has thought of everything. You
will leave at night.’

At the 1980 Olympics, Brezhnev begins his speech. “O!” — applause. “O!” — more applause. “O!” — yet more applause. “O!” — an ovation. “O!!!” — the whole audience stands up and applauds. An aide comes running to the podium and whispers, “Leonid Ilyich, that's the Olympic rings, you don't need to read it!”

Of course, people did not choose Gorbachev in an open election, but they were crying out for change.

Victor Tsoi, the USSR's most legendary rock star, distilled this sentiment in the song “(We want) Changes”:

The words articulate much of what American youth was also feeling on the eve of this vote:

Instead of fire - there's only smoke.
Instead of warmth - cold.
Another day is crossed out on the calendar grid.
The red shining sun has completely burned out,
And this day goes out with it,
And over a glowing city, the shadow will fall

We want changes!
It's the demand of our hearts.
We want changes!
It's the demand of our eyes.
In our laughter, in our tears, and the pulse in our veins.
We want changes!
And changes will begin…

WHAT DOES ALL THIS MEAN FOR RUSSIAN-AMERICAN RELATIONS?

Unfortunately, history is in danger of repeating itself as farce.

When Gorbachev unveiled his New Thinking on international relations, the Reagan administration was very slow to react. By the time the US had come round in 1989, too much valuable time was lost, and Gorbachev's vision, and job, were in terminal crisis.

The Russian people have still not forgiven what they see as cruel American circumspection and delay in engaging their country's sincere offer of a clean slate.

So far, it looks like Medvedev is following in Reagan's footsteps. He was the last major head of state to congratulate Obama. The day before his election, Medvedev delivered some pointed barbs at the US, and the day after, declared his intention to install rockets in Kaliningrad.

Medvedev's caution is widely shared. Like Reagan's America, while Russians are broadly happy about Obama's victory, few believe that the US can really change its stripes; perhaps this whole Obama thing is some sort of cunning ruse, the repackaging of ‘imperialism’ as ‘leadership’ etc etc etc.

Speculation that Obama is considering bringing in former Clinton officials like Holbrooke (despised in Russia for expanding Nato and bombing Yugoslavia) plays into that very narrative.

This threatens to be a self-fulfilling prophecy; Russian policies must not provide any excuse for a genuine hawk takeover of the Obama administration.

Democratic presidents are automatically on the defensive about perceived ‘foreign policy weakness’ (one reason why the USSR preferred Republicans). Thus, by acting conciliatory and not being seen to take advantage of US overstretch, Medvedev can do much to blunt this criticism and avoid the pitfalls encountered between Russia and previous Democratic administrations.

On the other hand, any attempts to exploit or test the new president will only invite Obama to over-compensate.

Moreover, Medvedev should not forget that Obama was the only presidential candidate to have placed responsibility of both Russia and Georgia for the August war, at a time when seeminly everyone else was single-and simple-mindedly condemning Russia.

It is entirely understandable for Russians to have a certain amount of cynicism regarding US elections: foreign policy has traditionally been largely non-negotiable (’partisanship stops at the water's edge’) and decoupled from domestic policy. This is how a domestic liberal like Clinton could also comfortably be a foreign affairs hawk.

However, it is too easy and irresponsible to not see the trees for the forest.

This year may present a perfect foreign policy storm for the US: Obama's personal anti-war, pro-detente stance+ US ‘imperial overstretch’ in Afghanistan and Iraq+economic crisis that will necessitate roll backs in defence spending+public opinion sea-change all point to the possibility of an at least quantitatively new direction.

Obama may not seem radical enough for some Russians, but Katrina Vanden Heuvel is confident that his election is good for Russia.Most importantly, no matter what Medvedev may think of Obama's intentions, the American public hungers for change.

Russia: take America at her word today, as America should have taken you at yours in 1987.

You may regret not having done so.

Who says Russia has no soft power?

Well, Robert Amsterdam, for one. He has argued that the Russian invasion of Georgia illustrated its woeful loss of any sort of diplomatic legitimacy.

Outside of polite society, it has been a point beaten to death by such brownshirted bloggers as la Russophobe:  “Russia's need to rely on physical force obviously shows that even in regard to a tiny country like Georgia (population less than half the city of Moscow), Russia lacks any other way to deal with a crisis”.

Unfortunately, these sentiments have got the upper hand since the Georgian war, but it was not always so. For example, in a 2006 report for the Brookings Institution, Fiona Hill wrote that

It is by no means assured that Russia's increasing soft power will be used to positive effect. But the prospect is clearly there‚ and should be encouraging Russia's current leadership to chart a new regional policy for itself in Eurasia.

Such optimism seemed quaint during the Georgian War, but as the smoke clears, it now seems that Russian soft power might have been strengthened, not weakened, by the war.

According to the BBC, today's signing of an agreement to resolve the status of another disputed region - Nagorno-Karabakh - by Armenia and Azerbaijan in Moscow, may have been spurned on by Moscow's ‘hard power’ actions in August:
“Correspondents say Russia's brief war with Georgia in August has given impetus to international efforts to resolve disputes in the Caucasus, a region where Moscow is seeking greater influence”