“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.

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.

Russia and Italy just go together.

Because Italy had the warmest relations with the Soviet Union of any Nato member state, Russia’s best-selling car was based on a Fiat and manufactured in a town named after the head of the Italian Communist Party.

But it’s no longer movies, Ladas and socialism that keep the two countries close today: Much of that is down to the strong links between Putin and Berlusconi.

They frequently host each other, and at one diplomatic function, ‘the two men found so much pleasure in the company of each other that they were more than two hours late for the press conference and cultural awards ceremony’.

But there is a much more insidious affinity between the two statesmen.

According to the Yugoslavian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, ‘both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are gradually being reduced to an empty shell’ by authoritarian capitalism.

Dissident sociologist Boris Kagarlitsky called the Putin regime a ‘neoliberal autocracy’; let’s not forget that many of the young economists that surrounded Putin in his first term were Ayn Randian free-marketers such as German Gref and Andrei Illarionov.

As the radical Eduard Limonov wrote, ‘The Putin regime is a liberal regime…Just look at Putin’s economic program: Low taxes, concentration of wealth in oligarchs’ hands, strict budgets’.

Like Berlusconi, who owns the largest commercial TV network as well as controlling the three main government channels, Putin runs the Russian media and a great deal of its business sector.

If, ‘in a democracy, the ordinary citizen is effectively a king’, writes Zizek, then in Italy and Russia he is ‘a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are merely formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive’.

The result - ‘Putin’s capitalism with ‘Russian values’ (the brutal display of power), and Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’ (comical posturing)’ - contains one important constant: the free market base.

When Putin imprisoned Mikhail Khodorkovsky for wanting to sell parts of his oil business to the West, he was criticised abroad for political interference in the energy market.

What to make then of the EU and US cheerleading for Nabucco, a pipeline with no economic rationale being built solely for the political reason of isolating Russia as a gas supplier?

Certainly, it makes very little business sense: running from Turkey via Southern and Eastern Europe to the West, the pipleine’s capacity would be less than half that of Russia’s alternative South Stream route, which is already supported by key states such as Italy, France and Azerbaijan and ‘could reach 63 bcm annually‘.

“‘Nabucco is turning pipeline economics on its head,’ says Paul Stevens, senior research fellow on energy at Chatham House in London quoted in the Christian Science Monitor. ‘Normally you find gas and build a pipeline. Nabucco is building a pipeline, and then looking for gas.’”

But it does not take long to undertand the real rationale behind the plan. The very same article’s headline reads: ‘Will Nabucco pipeline deal free Europe from Russian gas?’, and makes at least one (mindblowing original) reference to “the Russian bear”. Lest any additional meaning be lost, the name Nabucco itself, we are told, “is named after a Verdi opera whose subject is liberation from bondage”.

But whose bondage from whom? The only supply problems the EU have ever experienced with Russian gas has been during disputes with Ukraine. But South Stream, which bipasses Ukraine and other conflict prone states such as Poland, should guarantee against such shocks in the future.

This conscious and costly policy of isolating Russia, ostensibly to avoid dangerous over-reliance, seems doubly odd given the overwhelming Western reliance on China, which boasts both a more repressive political system and stronger military might, and the Arab world.

Unsurprisingly, most Western media have been reliably backing Nabucco, not least the New York Times.

In a strange article about the two German cheerleaders of Nabucco and South Stream respectively: Joska Fishcer and Gerhadt Schroeder, the Times inevitably sides with Fischer - ‘a man in a white hat riding into town to stare down or be gunned down by a guy in a black one’, blind to the the irony of a former Green Party leader lobbying for a project widely condemned by environmental groups.

Nabucco’s commercial irrelevance, coupled with its heavy reliance on Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania - which comprise a Nato arc all along Russia’s south-western flank - threatens to awaken Russian fears of a return to Cold-War era encirclement.

For Lenin, the only question that mattered in a revolution was ‘kto - kogo’: who is dominating whom?

Today, the questions of which people? and whose power? are seldom directly addressed in the media’s euphoric mentions of ‘people power’ during eruptions of popular protest.

However, they often determine the press angle and coverage of the events, especially during the recent near simultaneous anti-government demonstrations in Moldova and Georgia.

Throughout, all the Coloured revolutions adhered to a narrative that pitched the “modern and western” against the “backward-looking and Russian”. The recent events in Moldova were no exception.

As today’s NY Times article states: “In a way, Moldova is grappling with the same challenge as Georgia and Ukraine — trying to join the West after decades of Russian influence”

The young anti-government protestors, “in their teens and 20s, say they are desperate to escape a Soviet time warp and enter Europe. But many of their elders feel more affinity with Russia, and see the protests as a plot by their western neighbor Romania to snatch away Moldova’s sovereignty”.

Of course, these cleavages are misleading. For a start, the Communist Victor Voronin, whose electoral victory launched the revolt, has actually been vocally and consistently in favour of joining the EU and modernising the economy.

But those kinds of facts don’t matter. This is because, as we’ve seen so often in the past (remember Yeltsin on his tank?) when it comes to Western media interactions with people power, image is everything.

Just protesting the government is not nearly enough: here are the boxes that must be ticked for an uprising to get positive coverage in the US press:

Young?
Western educated?
Photogenic?
Media savvy?
Branded? (eg. Orange)
Modern?/Using new technologies? (eg. Twitter, Facebook)

In fact, the puerile coverage of these types of revolution does not even hinge on the specious and oversimplified left/right, young/old and pro-Western/pro-Russian distinctions. More disturbingly, it is all about perception, about being cool or uncool.

For instance, in Georgia, more than 50,000 protesters were on the streets on Thursday, many more than the crowds in Moldova.

However, the media coverage, as well as the Georgian social media, have been much more supportive of the Georgian status quo. For instance, Saakashvili - young, western educated, branded, photogenic, media savvy - gets his statements routinely turned into headlines in the west.

When was the last time something Vladimir Voronin – middle aged, Soviet educated, apparatchik-looking – said that appeared this way? Or Victor Yanukovich, for that matter?

The discrepancy is reflected in the internet response to the protests in Georgia, which has been much less enthusiastic than the Moldovan.

The young, westernised affluent bloggers in Georgia, who have much in common with the president, are generally lukewarm regarding the opposition, posting comments like the following:

Are opposition leaders more tolerant to different opinions that the government? Is Georgian society, maybe, not in general receptive to diversity of opinions or was this incident the result of a mob effect? Is Georgian opposition willing to listen to youth? These are some of the questions to be addressed and thought about.

Often, they have been downright sceptical:

Methinks, many people have one question in their mind these days - who wants Misha’s resignation? Are these protests in Tbilisi a genuine grassroots democratic movement, or is it just a Russian-orchestrated operation to oust Mikheil Saakashvili and to replace him with a marionette?

Whereas Moldovan bloggers and Twitterers have been portraying the protests as representative of public opinion, Georgian bloggers and Western observers have been much more cynical of the opposition:

It’s generally agreed that the main reason the rallies did not manage to chase Misha from power was that the opposition are trapped in a radical stance that is no longer widely popular in Georgia. People say they lack vision and that if they did oust Saakashvili their temporary unity would crumble and they’d be at each others throats, all vying for power, within days. Now, no one understands the limitations of the opposition better than the government.

Similarly, while much has been written about the Twitter-centric character of the Moldovan unrest…

it appears that text messaging and social networks like Facebook and Twitter played a key role in driving young people into the streets

….the Twitter tone is quite different regarding Georgia:

mhikaric: My friend couldn’t make it to work and is walking home. Once sympathetic to Opp, now pissed off & wishes they’d leave. Prob typical #tbilisi

Of course, in Moldova, only 16.2% of the population has access to the internet; with only 47,200 broadband connections in the entire country (for comparison, it is 70% in England and about 30% in Romania).

And as for twitter, Daniel Bennett has estimated that the number of people using twitter does not exceed 200 in the entire country.

Hardly a mass movement then. In fact, elitism was a central part of all the coloured revolutions. But who cares? For papers like the NYT, if a few cool people are doing something that correlates with a journalist’s conventional biases, it’s a trend!

As Hamilton Nolan wisely observed in Gawker,

Try this fun game: think of the most ridiculous premise you can. Then track down three people—no matter how disparate—whose stories can be presented in a way that roughly hews to said premise. Write your trend up as a story, put in the Times, and watch it become conventional wisdom quicker than you can say, I don’t know, ‘Absolutely Nobody Eats Cheese Any More, Because of Money!

No-one wants to read about the losers who don’t twitter, or speak English, or live in the capital city; who didn’t benefit from the post-communist ‘European dream’; who feel disorientated by the blinding lights of the new order and, instead of longing to escape to even more vivid pastures, seek a retreat into the comforting ‘old ways’.

Similarly, no one wants to read about the sour-pusses who want to spoil the party for the media savvy young reformers such as Saakashvili and Yuschenko, no matter what the (extraordinarily persuasive) arguments against them. Just as no one wanted to read about the saddo miners and ‘unreformed’ industrial workers who spoke Russian and voted for Yanukovich.

Or maybe people do want to, and it’s just that so few Western journalists, with their high school crushes and casual class and cultural biases, are willing to write about it?

Watch former Italian prime minister Giuliano Amato speak about “Russia today from the European perspective”, a lecture organised by the Foreign Policy Association for the Game Changers series.

Nearly a decade ago, the cover of the Atlantic Monthly featured a close-up of a gaunt Russian policeman, or was it a soldier, his eyes obscured by his cap, the words “Russia is finished” emblazoned around his waist.

Reading Jeffrey Tayler's unreflective, misguided, naive and offensive tirade at my home country, I felt angry and alone, like I was the only person on earth who sat hunched over the magazine with a red pen, futilely rebutting his facile middle-brow liberal orthodoxy and sneering orientalism, (regarding his notion of the Russians’ “oriental tradition of hospitality toward strangers”, I’d have liked to extend to Tayler the Russian hospitality of my pen towards his face!)

Of course, one glance at any issue of The Exile, or any article by Stephen Cohen, or, for that matter, one minute speaking with a genuine Russian person who had not been parachuted into the country in 1993 as had been the article's author, would have persuaded any sane reader of Tayler's inextricable troglodytism.

But what frustrated me was that the sane, educated, middle-brow liberal readers of The Atlantic, interested mainly in literary short stories but with an occasional taste for well written non-fiction exoticism, did not generally read the Exile or hang out with impoverished babushkas: the poor suckers would swallow Tayler's nonsense hook line and sinker!

So long as the Russian experience continued to be filtered for the West through the eyes of such eloquent morons, I fumed, there could be no hope of challenging their noxious paradigms except in the margins.

How times have changed!

Tayler's article was all about Russia spiraling into an abyss of organised crime and political authoritarianism (without ever acknowledging the true sources of this decline). So I was very curious to find a very similar article in yesterday's Boston Globe, an editorial entitled “Murder Incorporated in Russia”.

Except this time, the article about Russia as “a Mafia petrostate crouching behind a Potemkin democracy” featued a comments section, with 7 comments, each of them containing eerie Slavic grammatical idiosyncrasies.

For example, “Egorsha” writes:

Funny that you refer to Litvinenko case where the British, not Russian authorities simply refused to cooperate with the Russian investigation, refused to hold trial in Russia and instead absolutely impudently DEMANDED to change Russian Constitution prohibiting extradiction of Russian citizens.

Here is “1000119″:

The article is political manipulation on a murder. Well, what do you feel when children, young people kill other pupils and students in U.S. schools and universities? How can this country be called? I’m simply wondering..

and “Ragozzi”:

I’m not saying that human rights are crap in general, but I think that too much freedom is bad. It is the cause of degradation, demoralization and decadence. It's happening in America and I wouldn't want to see that in Russia. State controlled economics and politics is the only right way for Russia.

And last but not least, “Strukov”:

Who is the Boston Globe to judge anyone. The fact is that the media should report the facts, not try to sway public opinion with their biased version. You need only look at how the so called “free press” is in the tank for Obama. If Col. Budanov were a black guy on death row in Pennsylvania for killing a cop in Philly, the Globe would be leading the parade to get him out. I hope Russia gives America and Europe the big finger as much as possible.

These comments are very reminiscent of similar recent “pro-Russian” threads on The Guardian's articles about the Litvinenko case, and all feature the same hallmarks: virulent pro-Russia jingoism packaged in mostly-fluent right-wing and anti-West diatribes.

I should be happy to finally see “the Russian side” getting a voice in the Western media, finally doing what I longed to do in 2001, but the tone and content of it all make me a little queasy. I’m not saying that some sort of KGB ‘psy-ops’ team is trawling the internet for rebuttal opportunities, but maybe it is.

Whoever they are, the commenters are doing much more harm than good, and it is part of a trend. It is becoming increasingly clear that the Kremlin is not interested in true understanding with the west: why else would they have closed down the Exile, a paper consistently, compassionately and critically bringing the Russian side of the story as a powerful antidote to the Taylerian drivel in the Western press, a paper that has been the biggest ally of the ordinary Russian and the biggest critic of spineless US academic ‘Kremlinology’?

There are plenty of well-reasoned and compelling arguments with which to discredit the Western narratives about the new Russia, yet inexplicably, the very people engaged with that have been replaced with the likes of ‘Ragozzi’: authoritarian bullies who serve only to validate those flawed stereotypes.

Instead of an intelligent debate that could finally achieve understanding between Russia and the west, we seem to have leapt from the frying pan of Western journalistic malpractice into the fire of Russian state propaganda.

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.