Russia

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!

In today’s International Herald Tribune, Henry Kissinger delivers a very optimistic assessment of US-Russian relations in the post-Putin era. The king of realpolitik describes the Medvedev period as “a transition from a phase of consolidation to a period of modernization”, one which “may, in retrospect, appear as the beginning of an evolution toward a form of checks and balances lacking heretofore”. Indeed, “we are witnessing one of the most promising periods in Russian history”.

Whoa!! So what should this mean for US Russian relations?

Kissinger says that “Russian policy [is] driven in a quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice”, and thus, the US should realise the benefits of cooperating with Russia on strategic issues including Iran and disarmament; issues on which, rhetoric aside, they have many common interests.

Kissinger also warns that “the movement of the Western security system from the Elbe River to the approaches to Moscow brings home Russia’s decline in a way bound to generate a Russian emotion that will inhibit the solution of all other issues”.

All this is very sensible advice indeed, and particularly welcome from the man who brought peace between the US and China, and who has also endorsed McCain for president. McCain would do well to adopt Kissinger’s pragmatic, open-minded and non-ideological approach.

A similar argument is presented, in the same newspaper, but from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Eminent Russia scholar Stephen F Cohen paints a vivid back story of where things went wrong between the two countries and echoes Kissinger’s call to cool-headed cooperation.

Cohen forcefully lays the blame for the recent Russian international bullishness on the US’s own post-Cold War policy of “bipartisan triumphalism”:

It meant that the United States had the right to oversee Russia’s post-Communist political and economic development, as it tried to do directly in the 1990s, while demanding that Moscow yield to U.S. international interests. It meant Washington could break strategic promises to Moscow, as when the Clinton administration began NATO’s eastward expansion, and disregard extraordinary Kremlin overtures, as when the Bush Administration unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty and granted NATO membership to countries even closer to Russia - despite Putin’s crucial assistance to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan after 9/11. It even meant America was entitled to Russia’s traditional sphere of security and energy supplies, from the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia and the Caspian.

Such U.S. behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin leader. Those U.S. policies - widely viewed in Moscow as an “encirclement” designed to keep Russia weak and to control its resources - have helped revive an assertive Russian nationalism, destroy the once strong pro-American lobby, and inspire widespread charges that concessions to Washington are “appeasement,” even “capitulationism.” The Kremlin may have overreacted, but the cause and effect threatening a new cold war are clear.

He then concludes that “because the first steps in this direction were taken in Washington, so must be initiatives to reverse it”, and suggests policies very similar to the ones advocated by Kissinger: nuclear non-proliferation, end to Nato expansion.

If a Republican foreign policy guru and a left wing historian can be locked in a passionate embrace of a sensible US-Russia policy, is full on East-West BFF-dom imminent?

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.

There seems to be new trouble brewing in the Baltics.

Fresh on the heels of outlawing Soviet symbolism in what the BBC Russian affairs analyst Steven Eke called “the toughest bans on symbols from the Soviet past adopted in any of the 15 countries that emerged from the USSR”, Lithuania is now apparently in talks with the USA about the possible deployment of the controversial ABM missile shield should an increasingly lukewarm Poland drop out.

Moscow is livid. According to the Financial Times,

“A senior Russian lawmaker warned on Wednesday that discussions between the US and Lithuania over co-operating on Washington’s missile defence system “could not but provoke anxiety” in Moscow….

…Konstantin Kosachev, head of the international committee of Russia’s lower house of parliament, [said:]

“It seems that, through such little steps, people are trying to cross the ‘red line’ beyond which problems begin for the security of our country”.

Crossing the red line! Yikes!

However, it was entirely natural that Lithuania should have come to America’s aid.

After all, Valdas Adamkus, the Lithianian President currently considering stationing US missile interceptors and radar on his territory, had worked for 30 years at the US Environmental Protection Agency (where he was responsible for amongst other things, hazardous waste) in a past life as a Republican American citizen!

There is even an EPA award named after him: the “Valdas V. Adamkus Sustained Commitment to the Environment Honor Award”.

“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!!

Sorry for the silence! Been away celebrating Russia’s Independence Day…from itself.

(It is true: 12 June marked the secession of the Russian republic from the USSR. Not only is the occasion modishly Freudian, but it’s also simply a matter of justice: the US has an independence day, and so is Russia to be left without one?)

I’ll be writing a few proper posts filled with reflection (surely ‘invective’?-ed.) over the weekend but here are some things to keep you busy till then!

INDIE DAY:

Not content to celebrate Russia Day by relaxing with a crate or two of Soviet Champagne and a Brat 2 DVD, a rather energetic lot of Left wing democracy activists attended street rallies condemning the government’s treatment of dissidents.

EXILE AGONY:

The beleaguered organ is holding a paypal donations drive to replace its cowardly sponsors. The Moscow Times has the (hopefully exaggerated & premature) obituary!
The epic danse macabre, previously confined to this Blog and a select few other organs, is finally getting picked up in the mainstream English language press, with a vengeance.

Here is a rather good Radio Liberty piece that sums up and contextualises the event.

Mark Ames continues to chronicle the whole dismal affair on Radar Magazine. Read his latest “Russia Independence Day” post here, and weep sardonic tears.

TNK-BR VS RUSSIA BRAWL:

Follow the dirty energy confrontation over oil, foreign drilling and Russian sovereignty! Articles here and here.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain is well known for his adversarial, even anachronistic, approach to Russia.

Straight talk, right?

Perhaps.

But, asks Mark Benjamin today on Salon.com, could his bluster have had less to do with the Republican base than with the lobbying connections of a close advisor?

The architect behind McCain’s hard-line Russia policy, including kicking it out of the G8, is Randy Scheunemann.

And Scheunemann has until early this year been a long-time lobbyist for Georgia, Latvia, Romania and Macedonia, receiving over $2 million in pay from them.

Moreover, “much of Scheunemann’s work focused on paving the way into the NATO fold. Two of Scheunemann’s clients, Latvia and Romania, were admitted to full NATO member status in 2004, after which they ceased paying him”.

Of course, that does not mean that any of these countries paid Scheunemann to influence McCain to enact an anti-Russian agenda. However, “‘those are countries whose advantage it is to point the finger at a Russian threat, particularly Georgia,’ explained Thomas Simons, ambassador to Poland under George H.W. Bush and to Pakistan under Bill Clinton”.

Crucially, asks Harvard’s Dmitry Gorenburg, if McCain and Scheunemann “‘have had an association for a long time, how do you tell if it is because they think alike, or one has told the other how to think because he is getting paid?’”

McCain likes to say that unlike Bush, who claims to have looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul, he saw the letters K, G and B instead.

But maybe what he really saw were the letters U, S, and D?

Being 4767 miles away from Manhattan, Moscow has had good reason to feel left out lately.

With all the hullabaloo about ‘oversharing‘, media blogs and New York culture, culminating in the appearance of sultry literary saloniste Emily Gould on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, this Blog has been forced to mantain a dignified, yet distinctly provincial, silence.

Frustrated, I had taken to neurotically refreshing the Gawker homepage several times a minute, scanning the New Republic’s back section, and even reading the obligatory Keith Gessen paean to post-Harvard ennui, All the Sad Young Literary Men (stingingly reviewed here by the critic John Minervini)… in vain.

Not only did the travails of these achingly hip young literati have sorely little to do with my achingly loserish existence, they had even less to do with Russia!

Until now…

In the second issue of the new ‘it’ magazine, “Russia!”, Emily Gould tells all about a devastatingly ‘relevant’ phenomenon sweeping the US literary landscape: the RUSSIAN-AMERICAN WRITER.

Good writing on a very interesting subject with very little to fault it.

All of which still has painfully little to do with my own life, but at least I can now continue to enviously stalk these literary guys with the excuse that I’m just conducting research for future posts.

There has never been any love lost between John McCain and the Evil Empire.

As far back as 2006, he had promised to be “very harsh” on Russia. By May 2008, he was still vowing to push through an even earlier 2005 determination (in a bill co-sponsored with Joe Lieberman) to kick Russia out of the G8, declaring that the club “should include Brazil and India but exclude Russia” and that “rather than tolerate Russia’s nuclear blackmail or cyber attacks, Western nations should make clear that the solidarity of NATO, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, is indivisible and that the organization’s doors remain open to all democracies committed to the defense of freedom”. The statement was universally criticised, and even a senior US official called the proposal “just a dumb thing”.

Indeed, McCain, alone among the presidential candidates and isolated even in neoconservative circles (Cf Fareed Zakaria’s criticisms above), had practically included the country in a new axis of evil, his bellicosity eliciting much nervousness on both sides of the Atlantic, and even among conservatives.

Yet could talk of a new cold war should McCain be elected president still be premature?

Today, the New York Times reported that John McCain had

“distanced himself from the Bush administration on Tuesday by vowing to work more closely with Russia on nuclear disarmament and to move toward the elimination of tactical nuclear weapons in Europe….

…Mr. McCain told a small crowd at the University of Denver that he would pursue a new arms control agreement with the Russians and that he supported a legally binding accord between the two nations to replace verification requirements in the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or Start, which expires in 2009.

The Bush administration has refused to accept such binding limits on nuclear weapons, which its critics say has created paranoia in Moscow. Mr. McCain’s proposal to eliminate tactical nuclear weapons in Europe sets him apart from President Bush as well.

‘Russia and the United States are no longer mortal enemies,’ Mr. McCain said.”

Diffusing nuclear tensions with Russia, ratcheted up in recent years by the Bush administration’s unilateral disengagement from previous arms control treaties as well as by Putin’s revival of Russia’s strategic forces, is clearly a step in the right direction for McCain.

However, such a small concession is unlikely to quell fears of an ideologically driven approach to Russia from a potential McCain presidency.

Certainly, he is consistently viewed with fear and suspicion even among the most liberal Russian opinion-makers. The Russian wikipedia entry for McCain has an entire section devoted to the mean things he has said about Russia; pundits on the liberal radio station Ekho Mosvky have also said that McCain’s eleciton to the presidency would not bode well for Russia. In media outlets closer to the government, such sentiments are even more widespread. For example, in March, Izvestia (a national broadsheet owned since 2005 by state oil company Gazprom) reported that McCain considers Russia to be an enemy, quoting him as saying that when he looked into Putin’s eyes, he saw the letters K, G and B.
Moreover, McCain’s desire to distance himself from Bush on Russia would be a mixed blessing: although he opposed tying America’s hands in terms of nuclear weapons, Bush was generally cooperative and open to dealing with Russia, having famously peered into Vladimir “Putti-put” Putin’s soul. A reversal of that part of Bush’s Russia policy would hardly constitute a thaw.

WHAT THE RUSSIAN PRESS IS SAYING ABOUT MCCAIN’S OVERTURE: 2 VIEWS

Kommersant Daily (Liberal, independent):

“Hillary Clinton and John McCain Argue Over Russia” (May 29, 2008).

The article notes McCain’s “radical” steps towards nuclear negotiations with Russia, and then mentions Hillary Clinton’s responce. Clinton poured scepticism on McCain’s proposals, saying that any overtures to Russia would be undermined by his recent and continued attempts to throw the country out of the G8. No editorial comment.

Izvestia (Centrist, Gazprom controlled):

“McCain is Ready to Negotiate With Russia”.

Izvestia writes that McCain’s recent overture was a great surprise, noting dryly that “up to now, he had given people little cause to suspect him of Russophilia”. It goes on to list a history of McCain’s criticisms of Russia, and delivers this stinging reminder: Mr McCain should remember that it was a Soviet rocket that downed his plane over Vietnam. Ouch!!

The article then states that like all candidates, even the “Hawk” McCain becomes more pragmatic as elections near, and delivers a note of rebuke to Obama for saying that his grandfather liberated Auschwitz, when it was the Red Army that did it. (Obama has since clarified that his grandad was in fact in Buchenwald).