If a newspaper has seen four of its journalists assassinated in 8 years for their investigative reporting about Russia’s power elite, would it launch a new series exploring the murky relationships between the Kremlin, big business and oil?

If it’s Novaya Gazeta, it’s a yes.

The latest article, called “Friends of the Premier”, charts Putin’s links to the Rotenberg brothers, Arkady and Boris. And what a story!

Arkady Rotenberg went from being Putin’s judo partner back in the old days. to a seemingly invincincible banker and entrepreneur:

In 2008, Rotenberg purchased a 10% share of Novorossiysk port, ‘labelled in the Spiegel as ‘one of the most criminal of the many ports in this huge country that are largely controlled by crooks’.

In the same year, reports Novaya Gazeta, the Russian state monopoly Gazprom sold Rotenberg 5 building companies, which through a series of holding companies were used in building infrastructure for Gazprom itself. The article goes into much more depth detailing the various murky transactions.It also delves into Rotenberg’s ties to a millionaire senator named Leonid Lebedev, as well as ties to several dodgy Americans.

In its incessant framing of Putin as an authoritarian bogeyman to Yeltin’s flawed capitalist reformer, the mainstream Western narrative often loses sight of the Kremlin’s coziness with capital. And it is money, not ideology and not even power that acts as its main raison d’etre.

This financial motivation, often overlooked in favour of more emotive narratives featuring nationalism or ideology, is the catalyst for repression in Russia. Unfortunately, ideas are not yet valued highly enough to kill for.

Within such a system, writes Lilia Shevtsova, “[Putin] appears to see himself as the ‘CEO of Russia’ and he and his colleagues view Russia as a business corporation.”

Adds Sean Guillory in his excellent analysis: “At the heart of every corporation is subordination, productivity, and management, management, and more management. Like a CEO, Putin’s power is rooted in the company’s shareholders, the Russian elite. Putin’s CEO mentality plus the elite’s propensity toward self-destruction makes their relationship symbiotic. Putin’s power is reliant on the elite as much as their power is reliant on Putin”.

Let’s set aside politics and morality and ask: Does Russia Inc. succeed on its own terms? The answer to this question alone will determine the system’s longevity.

In an article commemorating Putin’s 10 years at the helm, the Moscow Times’s Natalia Kraimova notes:

“A review of today’s top politicians reveals a motley group that appears to be held together by Putin’s will alone and would probably collapse if Medvedev’s and Putin’s paths ever diverged…Many officials appointed by Putin “occupy their posts exclusively by Putin’s grace and often to the detriment of professionalism,” said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies”.

Based on this, is a board-room battle heading the CEO’s way?

Russia’s annual disaster season is in full swing.

From the Kursk submarine disaster and the Beslan school massacre (along with the simultaneous suicide attacks on two airliners), it seems that if something will go wrong, it’s likely to do so between July and September.

Unfortunately, this year was no different: a major explosion killed as many as 76 people at the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectic plant, sending litres of toxic waste into the Yenisei river. And last week, a wave of violence left scores dead in the Chechnya region.

What was different, however, was the administration’s response to the Caucasian killings.

The LA Times’s Megan Stack reports that Medvedev ‘acknowledged that growing violence in the impoverished southern republic of Ingushetia is rooted in unresolved domestic problems such as corruption and poverty’, rather than external forces, blaming ‘unemployment, clans who could not care less about people . . . as well as corruption, which has really become very widespread among law enforcement authorities’.

All very laudable and grown up, you might say.

So what does Medvedev suggest to curb the unchecked power of law enforcement and monetisation/politicisation of justice?

Curbing the power of juries, of course!

Speaking within mere hours of his earlier humanism, Medvedev said: ‘Jury trails fail for a variety of reasons. We need to think about teams of professional judges considering these kinds of charges’ for extremism and terrorism trials.

What will these changes mean for Medvedev’s pledge to clean up the abuses that spawn extremism?

‘Human rights activists and legal experts said the change compromised the entire premise of jury trials and offered protection to police officers who used brutal methods to extract confessions from suspected terrorists in the North Caucasus’, accordin to the Moscow Times.

Add a legislative disaster to the bloody list.

Gorbachev tried it, and was nearly overthrown. But these days, two thirds of all Russians back a War on Alcoholism.

This according to a nation-wide poll revealed today in the popular online newspaper Gazeta.ru under the headline: “Bored of Drinking”.

Good news for Medvedev, who had earlier gingerly floated an idea of fighting alcoholism as a means of reversing Russia’s decline in birth rates, and praised Gorbachev’s aborted attempt for “demographic growth that was unprecedented in our country”. Only 3% of respondents said that limiting drinking was not the government’s responsibility.

An expected gender divide in the responses was surprisingly slight: while 71% of women supported state measures to curb drinking, over half of all men (56%) did so as well.

63% supported raising the minimum age to 21, and 10% favoured prohibiting alcohol outright.

Interestingly, support also correlated with income: 70% of richer Russians to 62% of poorer ones.

The zeal evident in these responses indicate the strength of the public’s desire for radical solutions.

Yet when asked if they favoured a price hike for alcoholic beverages - considered one of the simplest and more effective ways of curbing drinking - only 19% agreed.

In any other news week, the title of most amusing story would certainly have gone to the BBC for comparing Putin to a character out of Brokeback Mountain: “Photographs of a bare-chested Mr Putin riding a horse through mountain scenery may of course put some people…in mind of a recent Hollywood film about gay cowboys”.

But that was before Twittergatesk.

You’ve heard the story: “Russian attempt to silence dissident stopped the tweets“, “Root of Twitter’s woes lies in Russia“, etc etc.

According to the overwhelming narrative in the English language media, a plucky Georgian blogger (named George, natch), who also happens to be a John McCain supporter, was targeted by Russian cyber-warriors for speaking out against Russian aggression last summer.

But because it was too difficult to bring down a single web-page or twitter account, the government hackers decided to take down every social networking site in sight, just to silence the pesky truth-teller.

How do we know this? Well, because he said so. “I’m certain the order came from the Russian government”, said George, and the major English-language newspapers have literally taken the blogger’s word for it.

Only the BBC deigned to point out that “despite the blogger’s claims, security researchers say there is “no suggestion the attack was state-endorsed”.

He may of course be correct. After all, recriminations have been flying from both sides in recent days, with many in Russia remain unhappy at the decision to not ‘go all the way to Tbilisi’ and depose Saakashvili when they had the chance.  None of this would explain, however, why George was selected for special punishment amongst millions of like-minded bloggers, in Georgia and all over the world, who skewer the Russian government every day.

But even if all bloggers were not by definition the narcissists and hyperbolic self-promoters that they are, the absolute credulity of the elite free press during instances of such accusations against ‘official enemies’ is striking and rather scary. Moreover, it often seems that a burden of proof is only required when challenging the established point of view.

Indeed, just yesterday the New York Times condemned Russia’s exaggerated claims of genocide by Georgian troops in Ossetia: “It was as if senior Russian officials pulled out a dog-eared Soviet propaganda playbook that called for hurling the most outlandish charge, without recognizing that in the modern global media climate, their credibility would quickly suffer if the facts proved otherwise”.

It would have been a compelling article, had the same paper that decried crude Russian propaganda itself not been so willing to swallow the Georgian variety.