Russia

Forget Barack Obama: Medvedev is already the world’s first metrosexual leader.

Joel Stein recently wrote of the effeminate US Democratic presidential candidate in the LA Times:

“He’s well-dressed. He eats arugula (rocket) — which he buys at Whole Foods… He is, as we mentioned, quite thin. He may only be half-black, but he’s three-quarters gay”.

What a girl! Being thin, eating organic leaves and wearing an off the rack Burberry suit was the best Obama could do?

Once again, as with women’s tennis, robber barons, computer hacking, conspicuous consumption, espionage and racism, it falls to Russia to step in and show America how it’s done.

While it may have stalled a little regarding such incidentals as elections, a free press, tolerance for minorities and business transparency, Russia has made democratic history where it counts: by electing a president who appears to be more a puppet of GQ magazine than of Vladimir Putin.

Take this EASY QUIZ to see if YOU are a METROSEXUAL PRESIDENT!

1. When hosting an international summit, you give visiting heads of state gifts of:

a) Oligarch livers.
b) Silver scale models of the next generation T-90 tank
c) Signed albums of your own amateur photography, which include pictures of ‘Italian cherubs, a rowing boat bobbing on a dappled turquoise lake, ducks, and several landscapes’.

2. What is your favourite Crayola colour?

a) Bruised-Chechen Blue
b) Rib-eye Red
c) Deep purple

3. To relax, you:

a) go shirtless fishing
b) practice judo on little children
c) meditate

4. As a kid, you wanted to be:

a) a spy
b) leader of all the Russias
c) a lawyer

5. Outside of the office, you prefer to dress in:

a) a nuclear submarine commander’s uniform
b) just a strategically placed gun
c) turtleneck paired with a leather jacket

(ANSWERS: 5 Cs or more: Congratulations! You’re a Metrosexual President!

3 As or 3 Bs: Congratulations! You’re the new Prime Minister!)

A cursory analysis of Medvedev’s dress confirms the suspicions: Roped shoulders a la Tom Ford? Check. Waisted double vented shorter-than-average jacket? Check.

High lapels? Metrolicious!

Cheeky school-tie knot paired with uber-spread collar? Like, straight out of Gossip Girl!!!

And don’t neglect those nails!

Many commentators have attempted to paint Medvedev as little more than an extension of his predecessor. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In a radical departure, the new leader quickly jettisoned Putin’s boxy Brionis and his predictable, precision tied half-windsors.

But what does that tell us about his future foreign policy?

More than you might think!

Vladimir Putin’s preference for Brioni and Hugo Boss suits correlated perfectly with his close political ties to Berlusconi’s Italy and Schroeder’s Germany (Schoeder, too, apparently chose Brioni). Conversely, Putin was as circumspect of British tailoring as of its Berezovsky-shelterin’ Prime Minister.

Unlike his mentor, Medvedev is clearly a Saville Row man. Though we do not know exactly which tailor he uses, the subtly waisted cut and characteristic navy colour (preferred by the likes of Daniel Craig and Prince Charles) of several of his suits, together with his penchant for old-boy style asymmetrical tie-knots, points strongly to a W1S postcode.

Therefore, could the era of hostility and suspicion between Russia and the UK be drawing to a close?

It is too early to tell, but all those sceptical of sartorial power in international diplomacy should note the wonders Medvedev’s style has already done for Russia’s relationship with France.

The recent spat with America and Britain over Zimbabwe and Russia’s continued intransigence over the US AMB shield in the Czech republic have dashed the hopes of many in the West that Medvedev would make a qualitative departure from Putin.

The Guardian’s Luke Harding put it just so:

Medvedev’s hardline comments in one of his first major speeches on foreign policy since his inauguration in May are likely to disappoint western observers. They had hoped that his presidency might usher in a more conciliatory era in relations with the west.

However, whether one defines Russia’s position on these issues as anti-Western grandstanding or pragmatic self-interest, one thing is clear: the Russian press has been covering many sides of the story.

In the immediate wake of the Zimbabwe brouhaha, much of the reaction in the Russian mainstream news was refreshingly critical of the government’s policies.

For example, Vremya Novostei, a liberal but pro-government paper, contextualised the veto with a recap of recent moves by Russia to protect Burma and Sudan against Western reprisals. Then, it quoted Sergei Oznobischev, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies as saying that appeasing pariah states is a sure recipe for conflict with the West, and that the key to Russian great power status lies not in Burma, Zimbabwe or even China, but in partnership with Europe and the US.

Naturally, the government has not loosened its grip on the media, and that fact alone makes the appearance of such articles all the more interesting.

In a recent interview, former White House rebel Vladimir Ryzhkov drew a tentative parallel between Medvedev and Gorbachev. Gorbachev started out as a liberal, not a democrat. He wanted to democratise institutions in order to promote his vision of liberal humanism, not to have a free for all. Similarly, he started off with very cautious economic reforms, that began with a tinkering around the edges and concentrated on efficiency and market accounting mechanisms.

Medvedev has certainly started to tinker. Earlier this month, he announced that Gazprom, Putin’s Koh-i-Noor, would have to start sharing its pipelines with other companies. This was a pretty important announcement, as one of the things that made Gazprom such a threat to Europe was its ownership of both gas and pipelines: EU monopoly regulations forbade such things for its own companies, who ended up outflanked. Today came the news that Gazprom would lay off 500 executives, or 10% of the staff, at its head office.

It is too early to say whether Medvedev has any plans for a full fledged Perestroika. As the closure of the Exile has revealed, he’s not one for free for alls. Yet the critical press line and gentle economic restructuring may point to a liberal impulse that, like with Gorbachev, not only may come to fruition with time, but also be eventually overtaken by events.

Have I been completely missing something or has everyone lost their minds regarding this whole Zimbabwe sanctions situation?

Russia and China resisted putting on sanctions on Mugabe and now Britain and the US have been openly questioning Russia’s fitness to belong to the G8. Normally level-headed commentators have been feverishly proclaiming their disappointment in Russian collusion with dictators.

My first thought, however, was that the situation today in Zimbabwe is reminiscent of 1993/1996 Russia — violence to the opposition (Yeltsin’s bombing of the White House); massive voting fraud (1996 election); hyperinflation — or any number of contemporary Central Asian states. None of these have had sanctions imposed on them.

In the following rant, which reflects solely the ill-considered opinions of its author, allow me to introduce some reality into this moralistic, anthropomorphic hysteria:

1. The UN security council is a forum for international law and diplomacy, not a morality police. It is not the business of the members to tell other countries what political system they ought to choose.

2. Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe has indulged in political abuses but it has not killed, tortured or imprisoned any more people than has China, Morocco, Congo, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Nepal or [insert authoritarian developing country here].

3. The UN Security Council is not designed to impose sanctions on states that rig elections. The vast majority of countries in the world rig their elections; others, like practically every Gulf and Central Asian state, don’t even bother to hold elections. Many more others suffer from hyperinflation, violent repression of the opposition and economic collapse.

4. Sanctions almost never work anyway.

5. Countries aren’t people. They aren’t good or bad, and they don’t have feelings or morals. They are entities with interests. Condemning Russia for the Zimbabwe sanctions on grounds of morality is childish and dangerous.

OK, rant over.

PS. A very interesting part of the whole incident has been the role played by the Russian media. There has been a lot of very robust criticism of the government in the newspapers.  That will be the subject of the next post.

Goodnight!

Edward Lucas, the Economist’s Eastern Europe correspondent, raises a provocative point in his recent article for Standpoint Magazine.

It is certainly true that the worst aspects of the Russian system are often a concentrated form of our own worst shortcomings. Indeed, the West has largely lost the moral authority that it enjoyed during the last Cold War. Once it was the Russian elite who feared us, and ordinary Russians who admired us. Now the elite despises us for our corruption and weakness, and ordinary Russians see little difference between one lot of rulers and another.

So, after making such a nuanced, astute observation, what does Lucas go on to conclude? That Russia’s experience reveals some inherent, underlying flaw within modern society? That the West must seriously re-examine its own moral-philosophical underpinnings?

Nah!

How about: “just because we have many flaws does not mean that we are always wrong, or that somewhere else can’t be worse”.

That’s right! We might be greedy, corrupt and decadent, but there’s no case for moral equivalence with Russia, because they’re worse!!

Lucas brings up two cases in which the West has been charged with hypocrisy. Critics assert a double standard in the West’s push to for Kosovan statehood and its refusal to recognize the pro-Russian break-away regions of Transdniester and Abkhazia. Lucas recognises that this is one factor leading to the erosion of the West’s moral authority. So does he suggest a more consistent approach? A new politics of neutrality that could eventually transcend the east-west divide?

Erm, not quite:

“(the EU) is incomparably better than the thuggishness and mischief-making that are the hallmark of Kremlin policy in its former empire. We do not want Transdniester to become independent, because it will be like Russia. We do want Kosovo to be independent, because it will eventually be like us. Again, that is a blunt message, but one better spoken proudly than left unsaid.

Bottom line: We may be greedy, imperialistic, corrupt and undemocratic, but by jingo, our greed, imperialism, corruption and authoritarianism are still morally superior to Russia’s! Just because!!

Of course, there is a more reflective and reasonable, if alarming, lesson to be drawn from all this.

In his groundbreaking work Modernity and the Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman concluded that, far from being an irrational aberration, an “interruption in the normal flow of history”, or a “momentary madness among sanity”, the holocaust may in fact have been an inevitable outcome of an advanced, technological society in which politics had become decoupled from social controls.

“The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture”, he writes.

Likewise, the traits that Lucas and others criticise in modern Russia are not some kind of gross aberrations from Western norms: instead, they lay bare the problems and contradictions of Western society, civilization and culture.

Over the last 17 years, Russian society has undergone a condensed and accelerated version of the West’s slower, less extreme but equally steady drift towards greater intrusion of the market into politics and society, concentration of power and a weakening of civil society and democratic participation in politics.

Thus, far from providing smug confirmations of Western superiority, the excesses that Lucas sees and justly condemns in today’s Russia might just be warnings from our own future.

It’s a little unnerving to think that 17 years of Russian history can be distilled into one bad 90s Swedish pop song.

Yet the struggles between business and the state, between Putin and Khodorkovsky, between liberals and siloviki, between the democrats and the Kremlin, far from being epic ideological battles between authoritarianism and freedom, do boil largely down to fights over ownership and, ultimately, money.

As Edward Limonov said, explaining the feebleness of the liberal opposition in Russia, “The Putin regime is a liberal regime, so it’s natural that liberals like Khakamada or Nemtsov do not seriously oppose it. Just look at Putin’s economic program: Low taxes, concentration of wealth in oligarchs’ hands, strict budgets. 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”.

This should be kept closely in mind when looking at the TNK-BP spat.

It has been characterised in many Western outlets, and by BP’s Chairman, as a Russian bid to wrest foreign influence over energy resources. That may very likely be a welcome outcome for it, but at the moment, the Russian oligarch shareholders appear to be acting with full economic rationality. Ironically, it is the British side if anything that is exhibiting the more ideological traits, say the Russians, in forbiding TNK-BP from doing business with Cuba, Iran and Syria.

The oligarchs have accused the British of treating TNK-BP as a subsidiary of BP and preventing it from expanding in foreign markets where it could pose a competitive threat to BP. They also accuse Bob Dudley, the TNK CEO, of not presiding over the same asset value growth that rival firms like Lukoil have seen, and have said that they are not interested in selling their assets or transferring ownership to Gazprom.

At the same time, speculation remains rife that a sale to Gazprom is a long term intention of the Russian side and the government.

My point isn’t to disprove the fiction that saintly Western oil interests are getting raided by fat, balding Russian versions of Gordon Gekko, or rule following legitimates bullied by an autocratic state; whichever side you take on that issue, such a moralistic line of reasoning can lead only to misunderstanding, a kind of economic anthropomorphism. This dispute is nothing personal, just business.

To this end, Russian based American businessman and blogger Timothy Post has alerted me to a great article by Steve LeVine, Businessweek’s foreign affairs correspondent. In a refreshing antidote to a lot of economic jingoism we’ve seen in outlets like the London Times, LeVine gives a no-nonsense, dispassionate and incisive view of the confrontation as a straightforward business dispute.

“Is the latest oil drama in Moscow truly a rough, 1990s-style grab for assets, as BP has cast its dustup with the Russian oligarchs Mikhail Fridman, Viktor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik?”, he asks.

“The short answer seems to be no”.

The oligarchs have stated — and I think it’s true — that they simply disagree with how BP has managed their joint company, called TNK-BP. As 50% owners of the company, they want a greater say in its operation, including an expansion overseas. And they want the current CEO, Robert Dudley, to be sacked. BP could simply accede to these demands, and get on with business. That doesn’t currently seem likely, one reason being that Sutherland could have difficulty climbing down after taking the altercation so personally. Short of such a concession, one finds two potential outcomes, neither of them pleasant for BP: In the worst case (for BP), the largest single block of its own shares — about 10% of them — will come to be owned by the four Russian oligarchs. That is one suggestion by the oligarchs — that the dispute be settled by an exchange of their TNK-BP shares for BP shares. In this scenario, BP has said that it would sell control of TNK-BP to a Russian state company, probably Gazprom or Rosneft. The takeaway from this outcome is BP culture could be forced to change by such assertive new shareholders. Imagine Carl Icahn on steroids. In the less unfavorable outcome, BP would cut its losses and sell out its half-interest in TNK-BP. The buyer again would be either Gazprom or Rosneft, and the price would be far less than the generally quoted market value of $20 billion-$25 billion. BP would argue that any sum above $7 billion — appoximately the price it paid for its share five years ago — would be gravy. But in fact, it would be fleeing a genuine fear of the first scenario. By its hands-off behavior, the Kremlin seems happy to watch BP twisting. Don’t look for assistance from President Dmitry Medvedev”.

It seems cultural factors may also have been at play. Russian business lacks some of the important myths and normative strictures that rose in the West during the100 years or so of paternalistic capitalism that reigned till the 80s, and the current crop of billionaire financiers are definitely of the Hieronymus Bosch school of business ethics.

For example, there is little value attached to certain concepts that had taken hold in the West, such as the necessity for competition, the avoidance of monopoly, and a strict dividing line between the private and state sectors. Business is viewed as necessarily ruthless, and any profit-maximising strategies are fair game.

In many respects, this no illusions school of thought may be a more honest vision of business in general. Attempts to humanise capitalism through norms or political pressure have consistently fallen to the wayside when directly confronted with profit maximisation, the central raison d’etre of any business. The run away success of Rosneft’s IPO on the London Stock Exchange, over the protests of George Soros and others about the ethics of buying into a firm that allegedly acquired Yukos assets illegally, is a case in point. The success of the South Stream pipeline in out-manoeuvring the EU’s Nabucco consortium through aggressive business tactics is yet another. Ironically, BP leadership would also actually welcome the sale of the Russian assets to the state gas giant.

Thus, when BP’s Chairman called the dispute “a return to the corporate raiding activities that were prevalent in Russia in the 1990s”, Mikhail Friedman, one of the Russian shareholders, accused Sutherland of casting “this as a conflict between a recognized, respectable Western company and wild hordes of Russian oligarchs who are trying to seize power through dirty methods”.

In a comment on Steve LeVine’s blog, Mr. Post writes the following:

The expression should read, “All’s fair in love, war, and the oil business.”

The West could have created an atmosphere of mutual benefit during the 1990’s when Russia was weak but instead the oil majors sought to use their leverage and take as much as they could get from a weak and desperate Russia. Their approach created a zero-sum playing field. Now that the Russians have found their footing and are playing as equally well as their Western counterparts, BP cries foul.

Can we take from this that the West doesn’t like to compete in games where their “opponents” are as strong and talented as they?

 

He may have a point. Indeed, the BP side’s public complaining over TNK-BP, though in many respects legitimate, does smack of sour grapes. When BP created TNK-BP in 2003, the new company was evenly split, 50-50, with no controlling stakes; unprecedented for Russian-Western joint ventures. At the time, Putin himself warned that that was a bad idea.

I am only speculating, but it seems that BPs original decision not to push for a controlling stake in the deal was grounded in the confidence that it could maintain informal dominance in the partnership. Now that capitalist-savvy Russians have beaten the Western giant at its own game, it’s no use crying foul.

“The owl of Minerva flies at dusk”, the philosopher Hegel, wearing only a false moustache and flapping his arms, liked to whisper conspiratorily to terrified passers-by.

(No wonder his last words were: “Only one man had ever understood me, and he didn’t understand me”. But I digress.)

Just so, I am having a very difficult time getting to the bottom of what’s really going on with Russia and energy at the moment.

First, there is the whole TNK-BP saga unfurling in Moscow.

TNK-BP is a Russo-British joint venture oil giant currently in the throes of a major boardroom battle.

Some assert that the billionaire Russian shareholders want to buy out the British and sell the company off to Gazprom. At the same time, Russian officials have publicly stated that it would be a bad idea. What’s behind all of this?

Then this morning, the Wall Street Journal carried a long and detailed essay about the Great Game between competing EU and Russian gas pipelines.

I am doing some research and digging through my old thesis notes to make something of all this, and hope to post something resembling an analysis very soon.

Although, if old Hegel was right, and the state of man’s mind conforms precisely to the state of the world as he views it, then it might take me a little longer.

ANYONE GOT ANY IDEAS? PLEASE SHARE THEM HERE!!

So he’s finally done it. Just when you though there could not be anything more frightening than last year’s winners, the monster costumed hard/glam Finnish rockers Lordi… behold Dima Bilan’s mullet.

Last nights win was Russia’s first in Eurovision. Moreover, the fact that Britain came in last could also not have escaped unnoticed by the Kremlin.

Watch the history in the making here:

For a detailed sociological explanation of the Bilan phenomenon, click here.

The election of Dmitry Medvedev as the new president of Russia on March 2nd has been met with mixed reviews from leaders around the world. While many congratulated Medvedev on his victory and voiced hopes for a positive international working relationship with him, these salutations were matched by concerns over how the Russian elections were conducted. The German government called into question whether the election processes neglected democratic principals, but said that Chancellor Angela Merkel still looked forward to meeting with the new leader on her scheduled March 8th visit to Moscow, and that the election reflected the German people’s desire for “continuity and stability.”

According to the U.K.’s Guardian, France echoed Germany’s concerns over Russia’s democratic process, but the outcome was greeted with a phone call from President Nicholas Sarkozy to Medvedev the day after his election inviting him to France, and the new Russian president pledged to maintain a relationship of “confidence and openness” between the two countries. In part, France’s acceptance came in line with the United Kingdom and the European Union. Britain’s relationship with Russia was strained under Putin, but the U.K. government expressed its hopes for a more cooperative interaction.

Reactions from former Soviet sphere of influence were as mixed as their European counterparts. The Czech foreign minister aired “regret” that the Russian elections had not been as open as preferred, and the opposition party claimed that the election threatened the future of Russian democracy altogether. Meanwhile, a group of election observers from Belarus said that the process was compliant to Russia’s constitution and laws.

In the United States, the 2008 presidential candidates reacted to the Russian election results with their own doubts. According to this article by Kommersant, one of Russia’s daily online newspapers, New York Senator Hillary Clinton said that the election marked a “retreat” from democracy, while Illinois Senator Barack Obama named the lack of free media and the repression of opposition political parties as reasons for his disappointment over Medvedev’s victory. Arizona Senator John McCain voiced the harshest criticism however, stating in a press conference that the Russian elections were “clearly rigged.”

Finally, an editorial in the Financial Times recommends that the West be open to a Medvedev presidency in the hope of improving relations with Russia. An interactive slideshow documents one journalist’s travels on the Trans-Siberian Railroad to uncover why Vladimir Putin has garnered so much support for himself and his political allies.