The US, boxed in by a trigger happy Israel,  is frustrated about Russia’s refusal to support Iran sanctions. But let’s put Obama’s European missile defence gambit in perspective.

“If Russia is to give up Iran, the United States and the West have to offer something much bigger to Moscow than the scrapping of the missile defense system that never existed,” said Vladimir Sotnikov, an Iran expert at the Russian Academy of Sciences. And indeed, far from categorically abandoning the sale of S-300 anti-missile systems to Iran, Medvedev’s sole act of reciprocity has so far been to also remove some missiles that never existed, from Kaliningrad. Seems fair.

Russia does not want a nuclear armed Iran, so why is it not committing to sanctions? One explanation is that “Russia is enjoying the moment. Being a key player in the Iranian crisis confirms the Kremlin’s own view that Russia is once again a major world power. As soon as Moscow agrees to sanctions, Washington is unlikely to be so attentive”.

Another reason is that Russia knows that sanctions - though very good at creating civilian hardships - are far from effective at stopping countries from arming themselves (see Iraq).  So, being Iran’s closest big power trading partner gives Russia unprecedented leverage in the crisis to do something Western sanctions cannot: persuade Iran to back down.

“According to Rajab Safarov, director of the center for Contemporary Iranian Studies in Moscow, Russia has “sufficiently effective levers” to have an effect on Iran’s behavior. “Iran has an interest in good relations with Russia,” Safarov told reporters. “This means that Iran could listen to advice from Russia.”

Russia must also be careful not to unduly antagonise its large Islamic neighbour at a time when Dagestan and Chenchnya are experiencing resurgent separtist violence (two more senior Dagestani officials were gunned down on Sunday). While fighters have in the past been supplied by Saudi Wahhabis and groups tentatively associated with al-Qaeda, Medvedev-Putin cannot rule out the possibility of a spurned Iran (which is already being accused of supplying insurgents in Iran and Afghanistan with roadside bmobs) extending a destabilising hand to the militants.

At the same time, since the late 1990s, Russia has also cultivated close ties with Israel; in fact, diplomacy with this country may have contributed to Russia’s failure to make good, so far, on a contract to deliver the S-300 missiles to Iran. And Medvedev has hinted, albeit in a very lukewarm way, that sanctions against Iran may be ‘inevitable‘.

Whatever Russia will do in the end, its role in the Iran nuclear standoff is much more than mere grandstanding: in fact, Russia might be the only country with a key to its peaceful resolution.

In an inspired move hailed as “arguably the most concrete shift in foreign policy from that of the Bush administration, Obama might have just about made up for his disastrous appointment of Michael McFaul as his Russia advisor by scrapping plans for a European missile shield.

Even the Daily Telegraph, while deriding the US President for handing “the Kremlin a coup that will boost Mr Putin’s influence at home and abroad”, concedes that “Barack Obama’s diplomatic “reset” with Russia now has real teeth”.

Now that the ball is in Russia’s court, will the Kremlin “choose to frame the decision as an overdue correction of a Bush-era mistake rather than a real concession that requires reciprocity? That remains the 64,000 ruble question“.

Many signs point to the latter.  The Guardian reports that “Fyodor Lukyanov, editor in chief of Russia in Global Affairs, believes the wheels will start turning more rapidly. “We can expect the Start talks to be completed by the December deadline and the bilateral atmosphere will surely improve,” he said”.

So far, Medvedev has welcomed the decision but has not definitively settled on any of the 64000 rouble sides.

His statement that “Obama was “correcting” the US approach to missile defence” leaves open the chance that he does not consider the move to require any quid pro quo. This would be a grave mistake, of the sort the US made when it treated Gorbachev’s concessions on Eastern Europe as ‘corrections’ unworthy of reciprocation.

Let’s hope that, even if he does not consider the US move a concession to Russia (but rather a rational decision based on the ineffectiveness and cost of the ABM system as well as the infancy of the Iranian threat) he gives Obama te benefit of the boubt and chooses detente.

Vladimir Putin has a history of truly bizarre spontaneous gestures, such as kissing a terrified boy on his stomach or stealing Superbowl rings from visiting dignitaries. So what was so odd about him giving a passing factory worker his $10000 Swiss watch as a memento yesterday?

For a start, writes Luke Harding, “Putin’s penchant for expensive watches has raised questions about how he can afford them, given his relatively modest official salary. In 2007, Russia’s GQ magazine noted that the then president was sporting a yellow gold Patek Philippe watch, worth an estimated £51,000″.

This might be a serious question for an English journalist, whose country’s political system nearly collapsed over some MPs mowing their lawns at taxpayer expense, but not for ordinary Russians accustomed to the daily venality of their leaders.

No, what makes this story interesting is that in his watch-giving, Putin is clearly sending a cryptic message.

After all, this is the second time in a month that he has given away a watch: “Last month, in a moment captured by Kremlin photographers, Putin gave away another watch to the small son of a shepherd”.

Is it a coincidence that Putin’s largesse comes in the same week as Medvedev’s announcement that “has refused to rule out running for a second term as Russia’s president“?

Could Putin, who also “hinted that he was thinking of coming back in 2012″, be sending a Nabokovian message to his increasingly assertive protege?

Something like  “Your time is running out”, or “You are President on borrowed time”, or “I am watching you”?

Indeed, the BBC’s Bridget Kendall notes that Medvedev “pointedly did not endorse Mr Putin’s view that they would work [the succession] out between them” and “seemed to try to distance himself from his benefactor, as if to assert his right to hold an independent view”.

And while she goes on to conclude that Medvedev remains “the junior partner in a dance where his mentor calls the tune”, Putin has not been taking any chances:  alongside the watch he gave to the young shepherd was also a knife.

Secret documents smuggled out of Moscow proving a conspiracy between Thatcher and Gorbachev to stop German unification? Christmas has come three months early for Cold War junkies.

A cache of files copied by Pavel Stroilov, a young researcher at the Gorbachev foundation mere months before they were re-classified, have rocked England with revelations that despite her reputation as a hard line cold warrior and public support for German unity, Thatcher had actually reached out to the Soviet leader to prevent it.

In strict secrecy (recorded only by an unscrupulous Russian note-taker), she told Gorbachev:

“The reunification of Germany is not in the interests of Britain and Western Europe. It might look different from public pronouncements, in official communiqué at Nato meetings, but it is not worth paying ones attention to it.

We do not want a united Germany. This would have led to a change to post-war borders and we can not allow that because such development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.

In the same way, a destabilisation of Eastern Europe and breakdown of the Warsaw Pact are also not in our interests.

I can say that the President of the United States is of the same position”.

Today, the thought that Germany might cause another war in Europe is laughably quaint. Yet this was precisely the fear animating Thatcher, only 20 years ago which now seem like two centuries.

She even says: “All Europe is watching this not without a degree of fear, remembering very well who started the two world wars.”

Gorby himself worried about “the likelihood of new Bismarcks or Hitlers [appearing from the woodwork]”.

So what do these new documents tell us, apart from reinforcing the suspicions of being kept in the dark by our leaders?

For one thing, many of the fears expressed in the papers about German unification have come true.

Thatcher foresaw Germany quickly eclipsing Britain’s economy and destabilising Europe through its recognition of Croatia, which precipitated the Yugoslav war and led to all sorts of traumatic re-drawing of borders.

And Gorbachev’s prescient warning that “we won’t be able to explain it to our people if we lose the GDR” was proved right when he was taken out by an attempted hardline coup in 1991 from which neither he nor the USSR would recover.

In all this Byzantine mess, Gorbachev is the only statesman that comes out looking good and keeping his word.

At a time when Thatcher, Mitterand, Reagan and Bush were saying one thing publicly but scheming the exact opposite, he stood out (to the alarm of the others) by sticking true to his radical doctrine of non-intervention and de-militarisation.

As he told Bush in Malta: “The main principle which we have adopted and which we follow as part of our new thinking is the right of each country to choose, including the right to reconsider and change its original course. This is a very painful process, however this is a fundamental right.”

Though the USA did not keep its promises about Nato’s eastward expansion, Gorbachev kept his and removed all Soviet troops from German territory.

Gorbachev’s unyielding commitment to this rule sent shivers down the spine of France, whose foreign minister Jaques Attali told Gorbachev:

“A firm position of non-interference in internal matters of brother nations shown by the USSR during the events in the GDR have puzzled the French leadership. On the one hand, the French sincerely and with pleasure welcomed that fact that the ‘Brezhnev doctrine’ has become a thing of the past. However, on the other hand, the French leadership raised a question whether this meant that the USSR has made peace with the prospect of a united Germany and will not take any steps to prevent it? This has caused a fear approaching panic. France by no means wants German re-unification”.

Indeed, faced with the looming possibility of the Wall’s collapse, Gorbachev’s foreign minister, far from getting ready to defend it at all costs, says: “We’d better take down the Wall ourselves’.

Gorbachev’s assessment that “Mr Kohl is hurrying, fussing, acting irresponsibly, not approaching things seriously”, and that “the theme of re-unification [is being] exploited for electioneering” was vindicated by the chancellor’s humiliating defeat in the 1993 local elections, at the hands of the ‘newly liberated’ former East Germans.

A newspaper at the time wrote:

“Mr Kohl’s promise then that the east would soon be a ‘blooming landscape’ returned to haunt him yesterday as the voters of Brandenburg, which in some parts has unemployment of more than 30 per cent, delivered their verdict. In addition to feeling deceived by the 1990 promises of swift prosperity for all, anti- CDU feeling was fuelled by the revelation last month that CDU leaders from west Germany who had come to run the government in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt had been improperly over-paying themselves”.

Sadly, Gorbachev was also proven right in his warning that, in the event of unification, the GDR “will be bought up whole… And when they reach world prices, living standards will fall immediately”.

Twenty years after the fall of the wall, “unemployment in the former East Germany remains double what it is in the west, and in some regions the number of women between the ages of 20 and 30 has dropped by more than 30 percent”.

Is there anything we have lost in this painful transition from a world of Berlin Walls and potential mutual nuclear annihilation, which now seems an entirely different planet from the one we currently inhabit?

If anything, it may have been the very ideal that allowed this transition to occur peacefully: Gorbachev’s principle that every country must be allowed to choose its own way.

Speaking frankly with George HW Bush at Malta, Gorbachev warned:

“It looks as though if in the past we were accused in ‘exporting the revolution’, today it is about the export of American values. The USA are committed to a particular social and economic system chosen by the American people. Let people of other countries also decide which god they want to pray to. The result will not be a copy of Swedish, British or Soviet model. No. They are looking for their own version which will provide them with better life”.

In their rush towards integration into ‘the West’, the newly independent states of Eastern Europe had forfeited this agency, emulating an economic and political system created by other people instead of plotting their own course according to their own unique idea of the good life.

The sudden end of East Germany has shown that no system is inevitable or immutable. Indeed, in the wake of the economic crisis, citizens of America and Western Europe must also ask whether the economic and political system they have inherited is one they would have chosen themselves; whether it really meets their needs for a better life.

Perhaps it’s time for a Perestroika of their own.

That was the slightly exaggerated headline that the popular online newspaper Gazeta ru gave to GM’s decision to sell off the majority stake in Opel to Magna, a consortium of Candadian-Austrian businesses and Russian state controlled Sberbank.

In its triumphalism, news of the sale brings into stark relief the contradictions of the new Russia, whose increased financial integration with the West comfortably accomodates a simultaenous political and cultural retrenchment.

A stunningly literal example of this trend was recently highlighted in Russia Profile magazine.  In an article entitled ‘The Truth Russians Can’t Know’, Roland Oliphant writes of how the Russian edition of GQ, the popular mens lifestyle magazine, voluntarily chose not to run a story that appeared in its US edition alleging Putin’s involvement in the Moscow apartment building bombings of 1999.

Yet not only did free-market considerations not prevent such clampdown on press freedom, but they may have actively contributed to it:

“Why bury a relevant story?’, asks Oliphant. “Anderson [the writer of the original piece] himself is skeptical that the publisher is reacting to a specific request from the Russian authorities. “I strongly doubt that anyone told Conde Nast not to publish the article,” he said. “Rather, I think they acted preemptively and that the steps they took to minimize the article’s impact were done for a mixture of legal and economic reasons.”

“Conde Nast has made a significant investment in the Russian glossy magazine market, publishing Russian versions of Vogue, Glamour and Tatler, and a furniture catalogue called AD magazine, as well as GQ. For a cautious executive, that might be a good reason to stamp on any article that might rile the wrong people”

This news comes on the heels of reports that “Mikhail Voitenko, a Russian journalist who specializes in maritime reporting, fled abroad after he said he received threats for his reporting that [a Russian ship that had ostensibly suffered a hijack] was likely being used by corrupt officials to carry weapons”.

“Speaking to the BBC from Turkey, Mr Voitenko said he had received a threatening phone call from “serious people” whom he suggested may have been members of Russia’s intelligence agency, the FSB. ‘As long as I am out of Russia I feel safe,” Mr Voitenko told the BBC. “At least they won’t be able to get me back to Russia and convict [me]‘.”

This sort of thing should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the  unsavoury involvement of both willing businesses such as Google in Chinese censorship. However, it bears repeating that a greater commerical integration of Russia into the global economy, via free trade pacts such as the WTO for example, is unlikely to resolve its democratic crisis.

In Russia we have a saying: “Dwell in the past, and you’ll lose one eye; forget the past and you will lose both eyes”.

Amidst all the recent recriminations between Russia, Eastern Europe and the West thrown up by the anniversary of the start of WWII, there’s certainly no danger of anyone going blind. Yet the decidedly monocular perspectives of the parties concerned are not the best means of seeing the truth.

A rough timeline of the confrontation:

1) The OSCE equates Nazism and Communism.

2) Russia retaliates saying Communism saved the world from Nazism, denies Red Army rampage over liberated Europe.

3) Poland blames the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact for starting WWII; Polish president says: “On 17 September, Poland received a stab in the back. This blow came from Bolshevik Russia.”

4) Russia retaliates by blaming Poland for starting WWII with its own non-aggression pact.

Who is right?

Russia Blog has already written about the folly of equating Nazism and Communism. However,  the current fashion of exhuming the crimes of Stalin and the USSR as if they were somehow newly discovered is a politicized attack; not so much against Russia as against the Left.

It is no coincidence that every sponsor of such historical muck-raking has been a right wing government, including Poland’s Lech Kaczynski. July’s OSCE resolution was no exception, having been proposed by none other than Lithuania. After all, its ex-US citizen president Valdas Adamkus used to be an active member of the Republican Party and received a medal from Ronald Reagan.

In this light, it’s impossible to deny a glaring ideological subtext to any discussion of Soviet actions in the world, before, during and after WWII.

As Seumas Milne has impressively written, “Battles over history are more about the future than the past”, and those on the right who bring up the spectre of Stalinism are doing so “to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed”. After all, as Milne astutely notes, where is these same parties’ condemnation of European colonial crimes and massacres?

In the waning days of the USSR, Gorbachev publicly admitted that the Katyn Forest slaughter was committed by the NKVD and not the Nazis, as the USSR had maintained for over 40 years. ”It is not easy to speak of this tragedy,” he said, “but it is necessary”.

It remains necessary to speak of all the atrocities committed by European powers in the 20th century, from Katyn to Algeria to Vietnam. But there is something cynical and sinister about using historical crimes to smear ideological and/or geo-political adversaries: let’s not forget that the first people to publicly wave around evidence of those Polish killings were…the NAZIs themselves.