With a neo-con editor who believes that “with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero”, the New Republic is the last place to find a reasoned view on Russia.  Or on Iran for that matter, considering this famously faux-liberal magazine’s hawkish anti-Islamic stance.

So imagine my surprise at finding just such an article today! Despite its traditional headline, “Putin’s Game: Why Russia won’t cooperate on Iranian sanctions” calmly and rationally  answers the quesiton of why Russia is so against Iran sanctions: national interest!

How does Russia benefit from its nuclear cooperation with Iran? Simple economics provides a compelling first answer: The Russian economy has not only reaped the benefits of the Bushehr deal, but it has also been bolstered by the sale of fuel and the potential sale of additional reactors. What’s more, the nuclear project is only one of many economic agreements between the two countries. Total bilateral trade hovers around $2 billion, as Russia supplies Iran with consumer goods, oil and gas equipment, and military technology. Russia also enjoys privileged access (along with China) to Iran’s Southern Pars gas fields.

Russia’s withdrawal of support for the Iranian nuclear program might jeopardize these other lucrative deals.

Seth Robinson also points out that Russia does not want to alienate Iran in its role as a ‘powerbroker in the Caspian oil trade’, whose “position on the Caspian Sea, which is estimated to hold more than 10 billion tons of oil reserves, makes it an important and influential partner for Russia”. Iran can be a key political ally, not just in Russia’s pipeline projects: Tehran “has pointedly refrained from criticizing Moscow’s Chechnya policy, and has held strategic meetings with Moscow on the Taliban”.

All this makes perfect sense. And it is telling that the aspect that has got the West into such a fit over an otherwise perfectly rational position, namely that “Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran provides the Kremlin with leverage over the United States”, is relegated to the final point, the icing on an economically and strategically nutritious cake.

So what should the takeaway be for the US administration? How can the US expect Russia to throw away all the tangible benefits that it reaps from its relationship with Iran just to satisfy American sanction-lust?

Indeed, far from taking the advice of the New Republic’s pycho editor Marty Peretz, Robinson recommends that “if the United States seeks true Russian support, it must find a way to compensate Moscow for the losses it will incur by forsaking Iran”.

After all, Russia is not intransigently opposed to sanctions on principle: “it is worth remembering”, writes Robinson, “that Russia has already supported multiple rounds of UN Security Council sanctions, but only those that have not imperiled its own interests”.

Such a dispassionate focus on interests and strategic alliances is the only sane way to counteract the still-prevalent tendency in the US media to treat international relations as morality plays between good and bad guys.

An interesting (fake?) discussion took place between top oligarch Boris Deripaska and Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday.

According to veteran rogue journalist John Helmer, the exchange went as follows:

Deripaska told Medvedev that it is impossible to get a fair ruling from the law courts without paying bribes.

“The courts have become overgrown with the institutution of intermediaries and deciders (решалами),” Deripaska said, “without whom it is impossible to get a fair solution. Everybody knows you have to pay for it”.

“They should be put in prison,” Medvedev reportedly said with indignation…and assured Deripaska that to struggle against such corruption of the courts “is our common task with you.”

But, as is often the case in Russia, there is much more to this ‘common task’ between big business and the Kremlin than meets the eye.

On its face, an analysis of court actions against Deripaska’s company RUSAL “reveals either that Deripaska…is the biggest victim of the Russian courts, or the biggest perpetrator”, according to Helmer.

In fact, over the last six months alone, he has been sued 144 times (more than one case a day), with 92% of these, bizarrely, by the state railway company.

Helmer uncovers a potentially juicy relationship in which both debt ridden Rusal and the state bureaucrats acting against it actually benefit from these incessant trials. For one thing, “by waging an intensive, daily campaign of cases in the arbitrazh courts, Rusal management may be utilizing the court to protect itself from having to disclose voluntary bankruptcy”. The Chamber of Commerce, he reports, may also be involved in protecting RUSAL from state bankruptcy laws.  The state actors involved may allegedly be getting other rewards from Deripaska himself.

This case is all very Byzantine and difficult to follow, but its takeaway message was best encapsulated by the leftist theorist and dissident Boris Kagarlitsky, who recently wrote that “the state and the oligarchs, “as the saying goes, [are] ‘two boots are a pair,’ not only are they  ideally similar to each other, but they are unable to function without each other”.

He went on to explain, using as an example exactly the sort of thing Deripaska did with Medvedev:

The Russian businessmen and their liberal intellectuals adore complaining about the state and officials, and simultaneously about rackets, the  mafia and corruption, dumping the responsibility for these phenomena on this same state.

However, on a closer look, it is easy to understand that they have exactly the state they want. If you underpay taxes (which are rather low anyway), it is quite clear that the vacuum generated by the weakness of the government will be filled by corruption.

You complain about bribes, but – using those bribes – you receive contracts and public funds. And all time you ask for new privileges, grants, help and indulgences. Certainly, business would prefer to not pay either taxes to the state treasury or bribes to racketeers and officials. But if you would choose between taxes and bribes, between the strong state and systematic corruption, most likely, your business without hesitation would choose the latter. And anyway the choice has long since been made. Our state – as it exists today – entirely corresponds to that that choice of our domestic bourgeoisie.

Eduard Limonov long ago pointed out that Russian liberals like Nemtsov, so adored in the West, are not serious about opposing Putin because “the Putin regime is a liberal regime, and the Kremlin’s ideology is basically the same as that of Nemtsov’s and Khakamada’s, so of course it makes no sense to confront them as my organization does. They can only argue over the details of this liberalism, over who should own what and how it should be implemented.”

In just such a way, the Putin regime is also an oligarchic-capitalist regime, and Deripaska and his oligarch friends are are playing the same role in business that Nemtsov and his gang have done in politics.

“The party of power gained the result it needed by discrediting political institutions and the very party itself…the elections turned into a mockery of the people and showed a deep disrespect for their voices”.

This is how Mikhail Gorbachev, once a qualified supporter of Putin, summed up the results of the recent regional elections in Russia, in which the incumbent party just happened to have “won about 80 percent of all contested positions in some 7,000 districts around the country”.

Yet despite the state controlled media, it’s not like the population is ignorant of the blatant fraud: a recent survey found that only 3% of Russians believe the elections to have been free and fair.

And they certainly harbour no illusions, either: a respected Levada Centre poll found just 4% who believe that Russia is a democracy.

Yet while some opposition leaders, such as the Communists and the centre-right Yabloko party (which amazingly received 0 votes in a district in which their own candidate Mitrokhin had definitely cast one) were furious, most ordinary Russians might have actually cheered.

That’s right: although 95% of Russians polled by Levada believe that they have no control over their political destinies, a whopping ‘26% believed that democratic governing was not suitable for Russia’.

In fact, when asked whether they a) either completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is needed or b) completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is wrong for Russia, the proportion narrows to just 50:31.

Moreover, “the majority (60%) also said it would be better for Russia if the president controlled both the courts and the parliament…and nearly 25% said the Soviet Union had a better political system that the current Russian model (36%) or that in Western countries (15%)”.

The following Levada Centre graph illustrates the Russian approval of three political systems: the Soviet one, the current one, or Western style democracy (the fourth line, in green, is marked ‘other’).

Contrary to almost all Western political science thinking, the most popular system from 1996 to 2007 was the Soviet one (blue), consistently winning the approval of 40-45% of the very people who were supposed to have rejected it in 1991, and twice as popular as the Western style democracy (red) they were meant to have favoured.

But the most interesting journey is marked by the yellow line indicating “the current system”. Under Yeltsin’s supposed golden age of democracy and freedom, this yellow line never rose beyond 10%. But as soon as Putin came in, in 1999, it has shown a steady rise. In 2007, it finally beat the front runner, the Soviet system, and continues to grow.

Most importantly, for the first time since the fall of the USSR, an overwhelming plurality of Russian citizens prefer their current system to either an idealised Soviet past or an increasingly demonised ‘Western alternative’.

In fact, this picture of contentment seems to demolish the liberal idea of Russians cowering under an increasingly authoritarian regime, just waiting to be rescued back to democracy.

Other polls show that Russians aren’t particularly impressed with the government’s handling of the financial crisis; nor do they support Putin’s increasingly overblown vendetta against Khodorkovsky (59% think the trial is designed to line the pockets of those benefitting from Yukos’s collapse, and 75% oppose keeping him in prison for life).

So, is there just some sort of weird masochism at play in the Russian soul?

But if so, then why should Putin falsify elections that he could have expected to win anyway?

That is the central question. Why on earth did the Kremlin bother to delete Mitrokhin’s vote for a party, Yabloko, whose popularity had never risen above the low single digits even in free elections? What’s the point?

Similarly, much has been said about the ‘rehabilitation’ of Stalin. And yet, authorities have been cracking down on organisations and academics that have been researching the gulag and the deportation of Germans - measures that I can bet actually increase Stalin’s popularity in the eyes of his current fans, so why hush them up (especially in the internet age)?.

What is the Kremlin’s game? Seriously, I’m Russian, but I have no idea what is going on.

Before giving Moscow State University a statue of the humanist poet Walt Whitman yesterday, Hillary Clinton should have started by disowning the ideas of his nefarious namesake, Walt Whitman Rostow.

Squandering all the promise associated with the cuddly Tolstoy look-alike after which his Socialist Russian-immigrant parents had named him, Rostow spent his life promoting the Vietnam war and preaching the deterministic, neo-liberal gospel of modernisation theory in the (dis)service of American foreign policy.

But even from beyond the grave, Rostow’s crazy, debunked theory (the so-called Take-Off Model) continues to muddle the way Americans see the world, and particularly Russia.

Here’s how: In his deterministic vision of human progress, Rostow held that the entire world was destined to one day make itself in the image of America in a prosperous, free market and democratic ‘age of mass consumption’.

Today, American policy-makers and media continue to see Russian history as a fitful movement from an underdeveloped (authoritarian, communist) past to a developed (democratic, capitalist) future.

According to this linear and procrustean version of events, any Russian policy that does not correspond to the liberal democratic, capitalist tropes is characterised as anti-modern, as somehow ‘backsliding’ to the past.

This may explain the media’s obsession with pointing out the ‘Soviet past’ of any Russian leader that demonstrates qualities or enacts policies that go against liberal capitalism, even though the past of every post Communist Russian politician was a Soviet one (what other sort of past could it have been?).

For example, we are constantly told about the Soviet background of Vladimir Putin, but never that of, say, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose past leadership of the entire Komsomol did not prevent him from being portrayed as the (short lived) face of a ‘modern’ , ‘liberal’, and ‘capitalistic’ Russia.

Earlier, we were similarly inundated about the ‘KGB past’ of Evgeny Primakov, a Russian foreign minister whose independence and outspoken opposition to the Yugoslav war we did not like, but remained in the dark about the early years ‘modernist’ darling Yegor Gaidar spent editing the hard line  Party propaganda organ “The Communist”.

My problem with all this is not the childish deployment of selective memory against the perceived opponents of US policies, but the deeper Rostowian conviction that these opponents are somehow trapped in the past, whereas the present and future have room only for the liberal, capitalistic Russians we like.

It’s time to press the reset button on the Rostowian notion that only when it chooses policies and politicians favourable to US interests can Russia can ‘modernise’ or ‘progress’, and that any deviation from these signifies a ’step backwards’.

Coming back from the brink of death after a car bomb that put him in a coma, the Ingush president Yunus-Bek Yevkurov today dismissed his republic’s entire government.

Was it because he felt the leadership was not doing enough to stem the Islamist insurgency widely accused of destabilising this tiny territory and having tried to kill him?

For a Putin or Kadyrov, such a reaction to a summer of attacks that left hundreds dead over the summer and the president himself in the casualty ward, would be normal.

Yet for Yevkurov, who is not your average meat-headed Caucasus politician (having so far refreshingly refused to use the spectre of Islamism to justify cronyism and repression), the government failed not at counterinsurgency, but at law and justice.

According to him, “the cabinet had failed to alleviate the region’s widespread poverty which breeds violence”. Certainly, this sort of thing has been said even by Medvedev, but Yevkurov seemed to have been walking the talk: After all, was it mere coincidence that the attempt on Yevkurov’s life was made shortly after his well-publicised anti-corruption sweep?

Indeed, this blog has also consistently maintained that corruption, not religious radicalism, has been the biggest catalyst of violence in Ingushetia.

Moreover, the BBC’s Dom Rotheroe has just reported on the real and prosaic reasons why people take up arms in Ingushetia.

He writes that the local authorities often randomly round up young men to fulfil quotas and show that they are fighting the militants. In turn, their angry relatives join rebel groups:

“Some may do so out of religious belief, yet Magomed Mutsolgov of human rights NGO, Mashr, believes that at least 80% leave home because of revenge…In a society in which blood vendettas are part of a man’s honour, young male relatives of the deceased have to seek their own justice. They head into the hills to get a gun and take revenge. And while with the extremists, their ideology may shift accordingly”.

In a book written a half century ago, Victor Kravchenko, the Soviet diplomat who defected to the US in 1944 but later became disillusioned with the policies of his adopted homeland, wrote that Communism

“is a parasitic disease of the old order. It can be eliminated only by establishing a new order, and thus depriving the parasite of the nourishment on which it thrives”

The same could be said of the violence in Ingushetia today, which will only recede once deprived of its host: corruption, police brutality and institutionalised injustice.

“War in South Ossetia: Georgia started it”

Thus did today’s editorial in Britain’s Guardian say what almost the entire US media elite refused to do last summer. It referred to the comprehensive EU investigation that found the war to have been started by Georgia and not Russia, but could just as easily have been quoting this humble blog.

In a series of articles in August 2008, FPA Russia Blog exposed the blatant pro-Georgian bias of the US political class and  near hysterical anti-Russian propaganda spewed by mainstream news organs, when “the press’s credulity of official US government positions, easy embrace of jingoism and susceptibility to hawkishness reminded me queasily of its very similar performance in run up to the Iraq war”.

In an excellent commentary on the media’s complicity in the war, Glenn Greenwald denounced those “deceitful methods that permeate our political discourse, especially when it comes to demonizing America’s Enemy du jour“, methods which, as I pointed out last August, reinforced “to the uninformed viewer that it was Russia, not Georgia, which used the cover of the Olympic games to invade”.

Much of the media’s bias towards Georgia, whatever the true facts on the ground, was due to its love affair with the telegenic, fluent and media savvy president. Yet, as the Guardian shrewdly notes, “the ability to jump in front of a CNN camera does not confer on the Georgian president, Mikheil Saakashvili, the gifts of a democrat”. Not surprisingly, however, his crackdown on civil society groups and political opposition received little mention.

For example when CNN’s White House correspondent Ed Henry breathlessly delivered the following lines (with a straight face):

“…What’s really going on is that Russia is trying essentially to reconstitute the old soviet union.bring back the old spheres of influence. if you take over Georgia today, what’s next? Could they then move into the Ukraine (sic), could they take over the Czech Republic? These are awful options that are on the table, but there’s a fear that if they start here and are not stopped, what happens next?”

A year long EU probe was not necessary to unmask such claims as the nonsense that they are. But equally, perhaps not even such an investigation is enough to dispel the enduring anti-Russian sentiments nursed by the conservative-Atlanticist clique within Europe’s elite. This gang includes the usual suspects - a smelly alliance of right-wing pseudo-intellectuals (Bernard Henri-Levy) and past-their-prime freedom fighters determined to reinstate the Cold War that once gave them underdog hero status (Vaclav Havel). Just last week, that very group had issued a letter that compared Russia to Hitler’s Germany and urged the EU to defend Georgia at all costs.

In the wake of the report, that kind of comment becomes as ridiculous as the rubbish (so ably gathered by Greeenwald) that was spewed by John McCain:

[Putin] has exhibited most aggressive behavior, obviously, in Georgia. . . .We have to make the Russians understand that there are penalties for these this kind of behavior, this kind of naked aggression into Georgia, a tiny country and a tiny democracy.

and the Washington Post’s editorial board:

Part of the blame-the-victim argument is tactical — the notion that the elected president of Georgia foolishly allowed the Russians to goad him into a military operation to recover a small separatist region of Georgia. Mr. Saakashvili says, in an article we publish on the opposite page today, that the facts are otherwise, that he ordered his troops into action only after a Russian armored column was on the move. . . . Moreover, the evidence is persuasive and growing that Russia planned and instigated this war.

A year on, with a detente-minded Obama in the White House and the likes of Sarah Palin relegated to a museum of political curiosities, the EU investigation underscores just how much the GOP and the elite US media were on the wrong side of history.