My last post chronicled the large numbers of people (45% of Russians and up to 62% of Ukrainians) made worse off by the fall of the USSR. But what about the rest?

One man who certainly did not figure among them was Misha, the hero of a vivid, at times zany, groteque and poignant fictionalised account by Georgian writer and journalist Irakli Iosebashvili, the first part of which was published in the current issue of Guernica Magazine.  By following this post-Soviet ‘Gentleman of Fortune’,  the story paints a hustler-eye view of the absurdist, tragic and exhilitaring transition from state socialism.

Misha, the narrator’s streetsmart and charismatic Tbilisi father-in-law, was known even in Soviet times for his entrepreneurial spirit; in a nearly car-less society, he was called “Misha-you know, the one with the car”. As a result of his black-market prowess during the Brezhnev years, Misha “wore fedoras from Turkey and sheepskin coats bought in the Baltics, bell bottoms and shiny boots with big heels”.

Later, as Georgia spiralled into nationalist chaos, the “Soviet Union began to shiver and howl like some great poisoned beast, then went off to its noisy, drawn-out death”, and hyperinflation left Misha “suddenly bereft of one hundred thousand roubles”‘, he headed to Moscow to make dollars instead.

Iosebashvili evokes a Russia which freedom had hit “like a great slap, and people were still reeling from the shock”, where “almost every day, somebody took to the streets—Communists, ultra-nationalists, unhappy miners, cavorting paratroopers” and “pyramid schemes, faith healers, and nationalist movements, each stranger than the next, sprang up on a daily basis”.

This is required reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why would a shrewd Russian oligarch want to buy two notoriously loss making English newspapers? According to billionaire Alexander Lebedev, it was his fond memories of scouring the London dailies for information as a young Soviet spy, as well as being a “good way to waste money”. But really he just wanted to hang out with JK Rowling.

Now that he has already purchased the centre-right Evening Standard, the ‘oligarch with a social conscience’ is set any day now to close the deal on the Independent, a centre left-liberal broadsheet much closer to his champagne-socialist tastes: Lebedev blogs under the name Capitalist-Idealist.

But who is he and what does this all mean?

Unlike other oligarchs, he is not close to the Kremlin (while never doing anything Khodorkovskian to inspire their full rage). He has run on a reformist platform in the controversial Sochi elections only to have his candidacy thrown out by the authories.

Despite his KGB ties Levedev’s unabashed anglophilia has made him more welcome in London than the other oligarchs who have been playing real-life Monopoly in the English capital.

That was a very superficial analysis, and I will now do more homework on this guy.

But I leave you with this pricelessly disconcerting series of photos published in today’s Guardian featuring Lebedev and his bearded, seemingly taxidermic son surrealistically hobnobbing with JK Rowling, Gorbachev, Sophie Dahl and the Prime Minister’s wife.

Who is Artyom Loskutov, and why should we kiss his babushka?

While the industrial victory in Pikalevo (however Pyrrhic it may yet prove) hogs the headlines, the fate of this 22 year old performance artist from Novosibirsk has shown the stark limits to people-power in today’s Russia.

Largely ignored in the mainstream media, Loskutov’s summary arrest nearly a month ago and continued detention have electrified the Russian internet, overwhelming the social networking site Livejournal and setting off a hunger strike.

Loskutov heads a left wing, situationist-style artist collective called “Babushka After the Funeral”, which uses irreverent pranks and roudy street performances to oppose the government’s trend towards cultural and political chauvinism.

Inspired by the French surrealists, 1968-era philosophies of Baudrillard and Badieu, and the anti-globalisation movement, their manifesto reads:

When we listen to politican’s speeches,
When we face protest action,
When we go for election we cannot get rid of a feeling that everything is just a performance, a play.

Babushka have been holding successful annual demos called ‘Monstrations’ on May 1. But things first turned nasty at this year’s rally, “when an authorized 300-strong Pirate Street Party that they were organizing was thwarted by the OMON [swat team] before it started” on the grounds of ‘extremism’.

This despite the fact that Mostration’s organisers explicitly instructed participants to avoid any political speech in favour of dada and nonsense-slogans: “Fantasy is welcome! Political slogans and slogans which make sense are not welcome”.

Later, on May 15th,  Loskutov, whose phone had been tapped since April 28, was siezed in the street by plainclothed officers who then claimed to have found 11 grams of weed in his bag. However, he and his supporters maintain that the drugs were planted. This assertion is made all the more credible by the fact that that very morning, Loskutov had been telephoned by  “an officer of CPE (Center for Extremism Prevention), demanding him to show up for a ‘chat’”, which he refused to do in the absence of a warrant.

In the weeks before his arrest, Loskutov was subjected to a campaign of harassment by the Center for Extremism Prevention : he was ” summoned to the Center for “discussions”; his parents were also called and told that their son was a member of a dangerous sect”.

According to Chto Delat, a coalition of anti-capitalist and anti-Putin intellectuals,  the arrest was inevitable:

” Since its mission is to prevent extremism (whatever that means), [the CPE] has to find, interrogate, and intimidate “extremists”, even if there are no real extremists to be found…Thus, young anarchists who want to advocate the free distribution of information are charged with jaywalking (on a street crowded with police and other May Day demonstrators). Likewise, in order to show free-spirited young people in Novosibirsk that their Monstrations are a nuisance to “public order,” Center “E” arrests one of the people associated with this terrible nuisance and charges him with narcotics possession, a crime that is not even in their remit”.

Olga Kopenkina writes that “since the creation of so-called Centers for Extremism Preventions (or Department «E» as it was nicknamed), as a part of the government wide-scaled anti-crisis campaign and fight against terrorism, the arrests of journalists, students, environmental activists, leaders of labor unions, and artists have become routine in the country”. In fact, she estimates that over 10000 artists and intellectual opponents of the regime have been blacklisted by the Centers).

(The fact that the Centers were an outgrowth of the war on terror should give Americans pondering the wisdom of expanding their own national security infrastructure some food for thought as well).

Already, a group of leading artists, spiritual leaders and intellectuals have signed an open letter calling his arrest an “act of intimidation against all contemporary Russian artists” and “another step toward the suppression of freedom of assembly and expression guaranteed by the constitution.”

Or, as one of Monstration’s absurdist slogans put it: “Pull the blanket, cut the pies!”

**

[READ AN EXCELLENT PIECE ABOUT THE CRACKDOWN ON FREE EXPRESSION IN RUSSIA HERE ]

The Soviet Union worshipped the Olympic games as a proof positive of Socialism’s inevitable victory, one mustachioed female shotputter at a time.

Those days may be history but their absurdist spirit lives on in the most appropriate of venues: the Eurovision Song Contest.

Just as Russia used to go to great lengths to demonstrate its worldwide superiority in speed-walking, it now throws its national prestige, along with  $35 million (the most money in the event’s history), behind winning a talent competition that the rest of the world treats with tongue firmly in cheek.

Could you imagine Barack Obama touring the sets of the Miss America beauty pageant, or Gordon Brown coordinating the next installment of Big Brother?

Well, Prime minister Putin personally supervised the preparations for Eurovision; his handpicked director of state television demonstrating the unique and unprecedented capabilities of the stage sets like a collective farm chairman who had just overfulfilled his 5 year plan.

Last week, Kommersant, a leading serious liberal newspaper, reported with a straight face that “at the moment, it’s impossible to stage any serious shows in Europe because 80% of the continent’s lighting and sound effect machines  have been brought to Moscow” for the extravaganza.

The opening ceremony was unveiled by Moscow’s  mayor Yuri Luzhkov, who resembled an illegitimate child of Nikita Khruschev and Benito Mussolini as he pumped his fists in the air, blissfully oblivious to the joke of having a mayor who believes that homosexuality is ’satanic’ unwittingly presiding over, in the words of the eventual winner, ‘the biggest gay parade’ in the world.

That’s not to say, of course, that Russia’s traditional nemeses are innocent of using Eurovision as a cultural war: after all, today’s Time magazine’s headline beams: ‘How the West Won: Norway Takes the Crown at Eurovision’.

And also not to discount the fact that the show was indeed a technological feat (eg: ‘Ukraine’s Svetlana Loboda, singing “Be My Valentine,” did splits on a ladder set inside an oversized wheel -which she paid for by mortgaging her house’).

Yet the salient impression from Eurovision 2009 was embarassment: embarassment for a confused, insecure Russia trying so hard to impress at something that the cool kids (like England, ranked last in 2008) all see as a bit of a joke.

Not unlike Olympic speedwalking, in fact.

“Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months”

- Opening lines of Highrise, by JG Ballard.

JG Ballard, who died today, was one of my favourite writers.

It is not entirely surprising that this English author straddling science fiction, dystopian lit and surrealism should strike a chord with a generation coming of age amidst the embers of the former USSR.

In Ballard’s novels, objects suddenly take on meanings and applications very different to those intended by their usually utopian planners and designers.

In this way, a high rise apartment building promising futuristic easy living descends into a morass of primal violence. Doctors and executives become killers, elevators travelling mortuaries, stairwells stalking grounds. In some respects, this represents the triumph of the buildings’ and objects’ essences over the plans of their creators. Is it only a matter of time until every elevator, every swimming pool, every parking lot, defaults to its inherent, structural promise of violence?

Jeff Manaugh, architecture-philosopher and curator of BLDGBLOG, nails down Ballard’s aesthetic:

“Ballard deals with “architectural space: highway flyovers, corporate campuses, flooded hotels, suburban home-development projects, abandoned swimming pools, army camps in the desert. He presents the modern, built environment as this kind of psychological field lab for testing new ways of being human…You get humans trying to understand and psychologically accommodate themselves to the presence of vast, empty car parks, derelict hospitals, redundant freeways, under-subscribed exurban high-rises and so on. It’s a ‘malfunctioning central nervous system’ in spatial form”.

In a darkly poignant reward for their obsession with literature, it was precisely the newly-ex-Soviet citizens waking up on the morning of Thursday, December 26 1991 who were destined to live out Ballard’s novels.

What happens when overnight, familiar objects and rituals become denatured? And what happens when objects get given meanings at odds with their original purpose?

Ballard himself never consciously used Soviet or post-Soviet motifs in his fiction, telling Zinovy Zinik that “I haven’t referred to the Soviet experience… because I’ve never been there, and chiefly because I’ve been more interested in the latent pathology of the consumerist West, which is where the entire planet seems to be heading.

And yet, in his focus on those questions, Ballard’s books are at least as important to understanding modern Russia and its psychology as any report from the Carnegie Russia Center.

JG Ballard
15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009

Inspired by the moral profligacy of Dilbert, I’d like to shamelessly plug my recently published article in the New York Moon, the journal of ideas and flaneurism, about the history of a Russian reservoir.

It is surely set to become the Doctor Zhivago of hallucinatory post-communist Russian reservoir narratives.

What were all those funnily dressed, heavily armed chaps doing in Red Square today?

Depends who you ask.

Left wingers and old people were celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while Kremlin supporters were celebrating….a day in 1941 celebrating the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Granted, November 7th was always a confusing day to commemorate a Socialist Revolution that actually occurred in October, 1917.

But since Soviet times, when Revolution Day was the biggest holiday of the year, things have taken a turn for the utterly bizarre.

After 1991, Revolution Day ceased to be an official holiday. Yet it remained a thorn in the side of the Yeltsin and Putin administrations for continuing to attract large crowds, many of whom were communists and other regime critics.

Yeltsin tried to deal with this by creating a rival Russian Independence Day (independence from itself?),  an affair in June that, for all its very Russian absurdity, nevertheless failed to catch on.

Putin cunningly crafted Russian Unity Day for November 4, commemorating a bizarre and obscure victory over some Poles in 1612, figuring it was close enough to the original Revolution Day that no one would notice.

But the crowds stubbornly kept coming out on the 7th, a holiday whose original meaning is becoming increasingly appealing for many in the wake of the financial crisis. (Seventy-nine percent of Russians said they would welcome state regulation of prices and 58 percent felt it would be useful to nationalise big private companies).

Moreover, a growing number of people, 38 percent,  say they still see Nov. 7 as Revolution Day ‚ a 9-point increase from 2005

To counter such real memories, Putin commissioned a $12 million propaganda film about Unity Day, called 1612, to ensure that Russians “didn't regard it as something that happened in ancient history but as a recent event…that they felt the link between what happened 400 years ago and today”.
In order to drive home that link with modern Russia, the film featured unicorns. (no joke).

To add a further post-modern twist to today's proceedings: not only were the troops in Red Square marking, essentially, Revolution Day Day (Revolution Day 1941, when Stalin sent troops directly from the parade to the front), but they were also dressed in all kinds of random historical garb, for absolutely no discernable reason!!!

As a bemused Daily Telegraph hack Adrian Blomfield reports,

Many of the servicemen in the parade wore white camouflage just as their predecessors had done during the bitter winter of 1941, when many soldiers froze to death.

Earlier epochs were represented too, with some soldiers clad in the uniforms of Catherine the Great's imperial guard. They were joined by soldiers on horseback dressed in the medieval garb of the bogatyrs, fictional heroic warriors similar to Sir Gawain and the knights-errant of British legend.

Ironically, amidst all this phantasmagoria, some things never change; as an old joke from the Soviet era, about a phone in on the fictional ‘Armenian Radio’, shows:

‘Is it possible, an eager caller asks, to foretell the future? ‘Yes,’ comes the weary answer. ‘No problem. We know exactly what the future will be. Our problem is with the past: that keeps changing’.

 ”Every blog has the commentariat it deserves”, observed sad young literary man and post-Soviet film critic Konstantin Gessen.

For a long time, this axiom was clearly borne out by many cryptic, subtly menacing, and downright bizarre comments on this blog (eg. “Wasn't easier (sic) to get rid of Saakashvili by buying him a stove made in Iran?” etc).

However, I can now humbly declare Gessen's Law debunked: two recent commenters had demonstrated themselves to be made of better stuff than this organ, determined to shame/goad it to a higher level of discourse.

William Thomson, writes:

While I appreciate the tongue in cheek nature of some of these blog posts I would love to see some serious post about some of the serious issues occurring in Russia these days. The economy of Russia is struggling; the Russians are making overtures to the Cubans and the Venezuelans. The Ukrainian government just dissolved and is likely to shift towards a more pro Russian stance. Germany has made its voice heard in NATO and will more likely then not refuse to push forward on NATO membership for both the Ukraine and Georgia (which may or may not be a good thing). The Russians are attempting to project power with there navy by sending of their most powerful Nuclear Powered Destroyer (which I believe is called Peter the Great) on a tour of the Mediterranean and South America. Putin continues to consolidate the banking industry and economy as a whole in fewer and fewer hands. Russia is becoming a lender of last resort for at least one EU member (Iceland) as the EU proves yet again that it is little more then a useless bureaucratic mess. These are all events and issues currently unfolding, I would love to see some more serious discussion.

Another commenter, Chris Blask, linked to a provocative article by an influential Bulgarian political scientist who suggested that "If The Kremlin Could Vote, It Would Vote For McCain”, and asked an intriguing question: What do you and your readers think about Putin's choice for US president?

My thanks to William and Chris for raising the bar. Let me try to be equal to their demands.

Apart from Medvedev's weblog (only joking), the most momentous topics facing Russia are:

1) International financial crisis
2) Domestic problems
3) Conflict with Georgia
4) US Relations
5) Expanding international role

Over the next few posts, I'll be tackling this list. Unless I get sidetracked by Medvedev's wardrobe…

…I'd rather
compose
romances for you -
more profit in it
and more charm.

                                                        –V.V Mayakovsky

I am sick of this whole Georgia thing.

I’ve had enough of politics, international relations, diplomatic intrigue!

I hate how news has to be about events.

Who cares about events?

When was the last time an event even happened to you or anyone you know?

I don't know about you, but nothing ever happens to me. Does that make me a dull boy?  I mean, aren't all events, with a capital E, imaginary, anyway?

So from now on, I’m just going to put up links to interesting events stories and and as long a description/summation as I can stomach before vomiting over the keyboard.

For example:

1. Starting this week, The Economist is debating the West's response to renewed Russian assertiveness for two-weeks as part of an ongoing, Oxford-style Online Debate Series. The proposition is, "This house believes the West must be bolder in its response to a newly assertive Russia."

It involves Dmitry Trenin and Marshall Goldman, a professor I greatly respect for his honest and indignant account of privatisation in his book The Piratisation of Russia. The debate promises to be lively and intriguing!

As of now, 53% to 47% disagree that the west should be bolder! Go fellow travellers!!

2. In today's Moscow Times, Harvard's Joseph Nye pens a clear-headed analysis contrasting Chinese soft power during the Olympics with Russia's hard power in Georgia.

Without jumping to conclusions or offering reflexive condemnation of Russia's fisticuffs, Nye observes that the most effective foreign policy strategy artfully weaves soft and hard power.

3. A lot has been written about Russia's stock market plunge. Especially flimsy, not to mention disingenuous, were the shyster-economist Anders Aslund's attempts to link the recent economic troubles to the war in Georgia.

There are myriad reasons not to respect Aslund; this article adds yet another drop to his overflowing chalice of intellectual dishonesty and increasing irrelevance.

Here is the sensational way his article begins:

Aug. 8 stands out as a fateful day for Russia. It marks Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's greatest strategic blunder. In one blow, he wiped out half a trillion dollars of stock market value, stalled all domestic reforms and isolated Russia from the outside world.

Anders is himself clearly aware of the improbability that a Russian person could ever accomplish that much in a single day before succombing to drink, fatigue or the oppresive weight of the human predicament, because he never re-visits this bizarre claim.

When he finally gets down to a bullet point list of reasons for Russia's economic ills, the Georgia war doesn't get a single mention; its inclusion in the lead paragraph was purely for cheap titillation.

Incidentally, the points themselves were mostly sensible and apolitical, and reveal a half-decent, if supply-side, economist groaning from underneath all that reactionary, Russophobic trash-talk.

In a measured and grown up article about the credit crisis, the FT's Charles Clover and Catherine Belton note Medvedev's unprecedented injection of $10 bn into the banking system:

“The market hasn't reacted to Medvedev's comments. However, [it] should,” said Roland Nash, head of research at Renaissance Capital, the investment bank.

He said the president's comments may signal fresh investor-friendly policies, but were chiefly a “charm offensive”. He added: “This is the first time in history that the Kremlin has reached out to the investor community. It is fairly unprecedented.”

4.  Some have been making hysterical noises about Russia's military exercises with Venezuela. Instead, might I suggest listening to the Pentagon itself:

“We exercise all around the globe and have joint exercises with countries all over the world. So do many other nations,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman.

STOP!!! I CAN't HOLD IT ANYMORE… BAAAAARF!

I’ll leave you with a nice short story:

An Encounter

by Daniil Kharms

—