Russia

“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).

Having become increasingly politically sidelined under Putin, the KPRF, the Russian Communist Party, is trying its hand at film criticism.

The BBC quotes St. Petersburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich telling Reuters that the new Indiana Jones movie was “rubbish”.

Certainly, he is in good company. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw was not impressed either. Nor was The Times’s Kevin Maher, who calls it “the worst in the series”.

But it was not the paper thin character development or pervasive CGI gimmickry that got Malinkovich hot under the collar.

“Why should we agree to that sort of lie and let the West trick our youth?” he asked.

“They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war.

“It’s rubbish… In 1957 the communists did not run with crystal skulls throughout the US.”

Watch out, Ebert!

In his first speech as Russia’s new president, Dimitri Medvedev pledged to use his tenure in office to protect and expand economic and civil freedom in the country. But amid the pomp and circumstance surrounding his May 7, 2008, inauguration in the Kremlin’s opulent Saint Andrew’s Hall, observers are raising questions about whether Medvedev’s new administration will actually lead Russia on a parallel course to that of his predecessor, Vladimir Putin.

These questions were made all the more prescient after Medvedev fulfilled expectations and nominated Putin for the Prime Minister’s post within hours of the swearing-in ceremony, allowing Putin to retain influence through certain executive powers granted to the Prime Minister in Russia’s system. The world will be focused on the policy course that Medvedev steers Russia in, particularly since the cast of other international leaders will be changing over the coming year. As of January 2009, those changes will include U.S. President George W. Bush, who today voiced enthusiasm for working with Medvedev in his remaining time in office.

After President Bush’s departure however, his successor will have to work with Medvedev on the future relationship between the United States and Russia. Read this Council on Foreign Relations article to learn more about where Senators Clinton, Obama, and McCain stand on U.S. diplomacy with Russia.

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.

Last night’s Democratic debate between Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton hit on issues related to Russia, particularly the future of democracy under Putin’s likely successor, Dmitry Medvedev. While Clinton caught slack for mispronouncing “Medvedev,” Obama skirted the issue by discussing Russia without naming the likely future president, though both said he was “hand picked” and unlikely to bolster democratic institutions. Here is a clip from the debate (beginning at 3:00):