“If Putin says he’s against ‘Ukrainianization,’ you can translate that as meaning he opposes media freedom and real elections,” says Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician.

He was reacting to Putin’s recent statement that ‘We must continuously think about improving our political system… but we must act with extreme caution [and] not allow our political culture to follow a Ukrainian scenario.”

According to Fred Weir’s piece in today’s Christian Science Monitor, which chronicled an unprecedented public disagreement between Putin and Medvedev over the direction of Russia’s democracy, ‘many in Russia’s liberal opposition community [believe that] Ukraine, for all its economic difficulties, is one of the few post-Soviet states that still enjoys competitive democracy, including press freedom and open, combative election campaigns’.

That view of the country’s politics might come as a surprise to the actual citizens of Ukraine, where ‘political infighting, corruption, government deadlock and economic recession brought the country to a standstill’ since 2004 and where, according to the Global Post, ‘representative government itself is viewed by many as the root of the problems’.

Ukrainian disillusionment with its brand of democracy comes across clearly in a recent authoritative report from the Pew Research Center, where Ukrainians’ assessment of the change to democracy started out at 77% in 1991 (the highest of any republic save the Baltics) but fell to 30% by 2009 - the lowest of any post-Soviet state.

Russia’s view of its transition, incidentally, fell only 8%, from 61% to 53% favourable.

Yes, Russia needs deep political reform and democratisation. But the liberal opposition will win themselves few votes by suggesting politcally crippled Ukraine as a model worthy of emulation.

Mommy, where do Putins come from?

Some liberal analysts have suggested that he was parachuted into Russian politics by a sort of malevolent stork.  More critical ones have insisted instead that he was asexually spawned by Yeltsin in his own image.

Yet in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, Neal Ascherson reviews a book that goes beyond casting blame on the 1990s era democrats and implicates the entire post 1989 New World Order.

The ‘pre-fab’ is not some Soviet style housing block, but rather one of three possible scenarios for the unification of Europe in the wake of the fall of the wall discussed in Maria Sarotte’s latest history of 1989: ‘The Struggle to Create a Post Cold War Europe’.

According to this scenario, ‘the West retained all its existing institutions and simply shoved them eastwards’. But there was a compelling alternative left in the dust of 1989: Gorbachev’s model of a ‘common European home’, a demilitarised confederation of capitalist and socialist states from the Atlantic to the Urals, without Nato or Warsaw Pact, organised around Helsinki institutions or the OSCE.

In the victory of the old fashioned pre-fab model over the ambitious/utopian ‘common home’, writes Ascherson,  “the chance to build a solid bridge between Europe and Russia was missed. ‘Pre-fab’ led to Putin”.

It didnt help, of course, that modern Europe was built on a lie: Kohl’s famous promise to Gorbachev that if he lets the GDR go, then NATO would not expand East of Germany.  Yet 15 years later, “Nato had reached Estonia, only 100 miles from St Petersburg…The West cheated [Gorbachev]“, Ascherson declares.

As a result, write Sarotte and Ascherson, “a new European order might have been created, with Russia as a willing partner. Instead, the expansion of Nato ‘perpetuated the military diving line between Nato and its biggest strategic threat, Russia, into the post-Cold War world’”.

Putin certainly exploited this Cold War situation to his advantage, but he did not create it. Rather, as Sarotte and Ascherson show, it created him.

In 2009, did Russia celebrate or mourn 10 years of Putinism?

RUSSIA REBORN?

While experts can debate the extent,  there is no doubt that the country has grown at least a little bit richer and stronger under Putin.

However, as Daniil Kharms observed, the bigger the cucumbers in the shops, the better they can be used to bludgeon people on the head:

Tikakeyev took the biggest cucumber out of his bag and hit Koratygin on the head with it.

Koratygin clutched his head with his hands, fell over and died.

That’s the size of the cucumbers sold in the shops these days!

And indeed, during most of the last decade, Russia had in some ways come to resemble a rentier state. As long as high oil prices trickled down to the masses and a strong state provided security, people were expected to shut up and put up. But this year’s economic crisis disrupted this quid pro quo: as the size of cucumbers in the shops began to shrink, they also began to seem less scary in the hands of the state, and people started to stir.

Thus, a year that began with riots over used car tariffs and later massive rebellions in factory towns like Pikalevo saw Putin offer large concessions to striking workers and Medvedev give an interview to the dissident newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Moreover, whilst journalists and human rights workers continued to be killed, 2009 was notable for being the first time that anyone was ever convicted for the crimes.

THE UGLY:

For all its gleaming Moscow skyscrapers, 2009 painfully exposed Russia’s ageing Soviet-era infrastructure, attitudes to fire safety and vulnerability to terrorism.

As if that were not enough, the murders of Estemirova, Markelov and Baburova made Russia officially the most dangerous place for journalists.

Much of the trouble came from Russia’s achilles heel: the restive caucuses. Ironically, just shortly after Dmitry Medvedev delivered his own ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech regarding the conflict in Chechnya, Yevkurov, the president of neighbouring Ingushetia, barely survived a major assassination attempt. Things have gone downhill from there, with human rights NGO Memorial voting to resume their activities in Chechnya due to the rising violence. The cycle of revenge-fuelled violence will continue to smoulder well into 2010.

THE BAD:

His more conciliatory rhetoric did not prevent Medvedev from cracking down on domestic opponents, even if they were shouting nonsense slogans such as ‘Pull the blanket! Cut the Pies!’ like the arist-provocateur Loskutov.

Despite conclusive evidence of the disastrous consequences of climate change for the country, Russia continued to bury its head in the sand about global warming. In fact, many Russians would like to see their world get a bit warmer.

There were some unsettling signs of an unofficial rehabilitation of Stalin, even if some of these were blown out of proportion by Western media.

And 2009 also saw Russia return to its traditional sport of election rigging, with the questionable results in Sochi and Murmansk outdone by the massive fiasco that was the local elections, in which the ruling United Russia party scooped up 80% of the total votes and certain votes definitely disappeared.

The good news, if one is being facetious, is that a reliable poll showed that  “the majority (60%) of Russians said that the ruling party did not go far enough: that it would be better if the president controlled both the courts and the parliament…and nearly 25% said the Soviet Union had a better political system that the current Russian model (36%) or that in Western countries (15%). 26% believed that democratic governing was not suitable for Russia.

THE GOOD

But there were some genuinely good news for Russia in 2009, especially on the foreign policy front.

After a rocky start, the reset button looks to finally have taken effect in relations with the USA. Unusually for a democratic administration, Obama agreed to back down on the European ABM shield. And the two countries are on the verge of signing the first breakthrough arms control agreement since the end of the cold war. Russia is also playing a key and contructive role in the Iran negotiatings, even if it is not yet prepared to fully engage with the Nato effort in Afghanistan.

There was good news on the civil society front as well: Dmitry Medvedev followed up his interview with the dissident Novaya Gazeta by ensuring the successful trials of the killers of Novaya Gazeta journalists Politkovskaya and Baburova, even if there remains some doubt about these.

He has also injected some pluralism into the ruling party, which has lately been allowing some opposing voices to be heard in high policy circles, notably from Igor Jurgens.

And although polls have shown that most Russians feel disempowered politically, a group of plucky workers from the town of Pikalevo succeeded in grinding the country to a halt and extracting huge concessions from an embarassed Putin.

Despite a demographic decline, Russian society has become more developed since Putin has taken over. According to the most recent UN Human Development Index, ‘In the mid-2000s, Russia became a country with a high level of human development, achieving an HDI score above 0.800. The number of regions, where the index was at high levels, grew significantly – from 4 in 2004 to 12 in 2006, with Moscow moving ahead of Central & Eastern Europe’. Many problems remain, including vast inequalities between regions and income groups, but the development is a welcome sign.

Last but not least, 2009 gave us TAJIK JIMMY, Russia’s much awesomer answer to Susan Boyle.

PERSON OF THE YEAR

Following Time Magazine, which gave its award to Bernanke for solving a crisis in a way that was only successful when compared to an overblown hypothetical catastrophe (a full scale collapse of western civilisation) rather than on its own merits (a giant transfer of wealth to banks with few strings attached and little structural reform), FPA Russia blog names Yegor Gaidar its Man of the Year.

This recently deceased right wing economist was responsible for ushering Russia’s darkest period in living memory, tarnishing the words ‘democracy’ and ‘market’ for entire generations, and paving the way for Putinism.

Yet, compared to an imaginary hypothetical alternative that he dreamt up himself, his reforms werent so bad after all. ‘If we did not act decisively, in two or three months we would have an economic and political catastrophe, total collapse and civil war,” he said in December 1991′.

Lest we forget, no matter how statist the Putin-Medvedev model becomes, its essential economic underpinning - supply side based market authoritarianism - is Gaidar’s most lasting legacy.

MOST UNEXPECTED EVENT 2009:

-> United Russia wins 80% of local election seats.

ACTUALLY UNEXPECTED EVENT 2009:

-> Obama walks the talk of US-Russia reset, backs away from ABM system in Europe

IN 2010, WATCH OUT FOR:

-> What will become of Khodorkovsky. Ex-Oligarch’s fate will be a litmus test of Medvedev’s commitment to reform and relationship with Putin

-> The complete disintegration and collapse of the USA, according to Russian academic Igor Panarin (this will probably not happen, -ed.)

Putin, according to Forbes, which has named the Russian Prime Minister the third most powerful man on Earth, towering not only above Oprah (45) and Google CEOs Brin and Page (5) but also, conspicuously, above his own president (Medvedev, 43).

Forbes goes on to declare Putin the ‘anti-Obama’, who ‘might as well be known as Czar, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russians’ and is ‘vastly more powerful than his handpicked head-of-state, President Dmitry Medvedev’.

While the magazine does note that ‘Medvedev [is] beginning to show chutzpah; recently went Jerry Maguire, writing liberal manifesto’, it put the Putin loyalist and deputy prime minister Igor Sechin one place ahead of the president.

According to the Moscow News, ‘the inclusion of Deputy PM Igor Sechin - seen as a hard-line Putin ally - one place ahead of the more liberal Medvedev on the global list gave a clear nod in the direction of the siloviki faction’ as against the liberal modernisers often associated with Medvedev.

But where is Igor Jurgens? Jurgens (sometimes spelt Yurgens), is a top economic liberal policymaker and also one of Medvedev’s closest economic advisors.

His think tank, the Institute for Contemporary Development, is regularly coming up with outspoken and sometimes downright heretic ideas, such as calling ‘for a “parallel power vertical” (led by Medvedev) alongside the “regular bureaucracy” (led by Putin) to modernize Russia, because — according to the think tank’s head, Igor Yurgens — modernization is “impossible under the supremacy of the Putin elite”’.

In fact, Yurgens is regularly allowed to travel around the world and berate the government, from an official position: According to Whitmore and Coalson, ‘Yurgens made waves back in February by suggesting that Russia’s implicit social contract, in which citizens sacrificed political freedoms in exchange for rising living standards, had been abrogated by the financial crisis. Political liberalization, Yurgens said at the time, was necessary if Russia was to emerge from the deepening recession’.

So are we seeing, as Forbes suggests, the hoary rift between the ‘Medvedev liberals’ and the ‘Putin siloviks’? No.

It’s much more complicated and clannish than that. One common fault with Western analyses of the Kremin situation has been precisely a focus on ideas rather than clans. But the ideas are muddled together with so many other interests and questions of money and power that ideology ought to be the last thing observers should focus on.

One model that can be borne in mind is the succession crisis between Brown and Blair in 2007. While many commentators remained fixated on the supposed ‘leftism’ of the Brownites and the ‘neoconservatism-Atlanticism’ of the Blairites, in reality, there was no fundamental different of politics between them; simply of style and political advantage.

Similarly in Russia today, where formerly arch-Putinite Surkov, the author of the ‘Sovereign Democracy’:

Is trying to make common cause with — or attempting to co-opt — key technocrats and economists close to Medvedev in order to enhance his own political position and weaken his opponents in the Kremlin’, according to Whitmore and Coalson. ‘Surkov has long been engaged in a low-intensity clan war with Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin, the head of the siloviki clan of security-service veterans surrounding Putin…and is supporting economic reforms proposed by Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin, Sperbank head German Gref, and Economy Minister Elvira Nabiullina as a means of weakening Sechin’s control over key sectors of the economy.

So there you have it: today, in the service of political manoeuvre, a ’sovereign democrat’ makes a tactical alliance with the ‘liberal democrats’ against the ’siloviki’. Who knows what reshuffles tomorrow may bring?

One thing appears certain: any talk of a schism, of two camps in the Kremlin, is overblown (or premature).

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.

“The party of power gained the result it needed by discrediting political institutions and the very party itself…the elections turned into a mockery of the people and showed a deep disrespect for their voices”.

This is how Mikhail Gorbachev, once a qualified supporter of Putin, summed up the results of the recent regional elections in Russia, in which the incumbent party just happened to have “won about 80 percent of all contested positions in some 7,000 districts around the country”.

Yet despite the state controlled media, it’s not like the population is ignorant of the blatant fraud: a recent survey found that only 3% of Russians believe the elections to have been free and fair.

And they certainly harbour no illusions, either: a respected Levada Centre poll found just 4% who believe that Russia is a democracy.

Yet while some opposition leaders, such as the Communists and the centre-right Yabloko party (which amazingly received 0 votes in a district in which their own candidate Mitrokhin had definitely cast one) were furious, most ordinary Russians might have actually cheered.

That’s right: although 95% of Russians polled by Levada believe that they have no control over their political destinies, a whopping ‘26% believed that democratic governing was not suitable for Russia’.

In fact, when asked whether they a) either completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is needed or b) completely believe or just tend to think that democracy is wrong for Russia, the proportion narrows to just 50:31.

Moreover, “the majority (60%) also said it would be better for Russia if the president controlled both the courts and the parliament…and nearly 25% said the Soviet Union had a better political system that the current Russian model (36%) or that in Western countries (15%)”.

The following Levada Centre graph illustrates the Russian approval of three political systems: the Soviet one, the current one, or Western style democracy (the fourth line, in green, is marked ‘other’).

Contrary to almost all Western political science thinking, the most popular system from 1996 to 2007 was the Soviet one (blue), consistently winning the approval of 40-45% of the very people who were supposed to have rejected it in 1991, and twice as popular as the Western style democracy (red) they were meant to have favoured.

But the most interesting journey is marked by the yellow line indicating “the current system”. Under Yeltsin’s supposed golden age of democracy and freedom, this yellow line never rose beyond 10%. But as soon as Putin came in, in 1999, it has shown a steady rise. In 2007, it finally beat the front runner, the Soviet system, and continues to grow.

Most importantly, for the first time since the fall of the USSR, an overwhelming plurality of Russian citizens prefer their current system to either an idealised Soviet past or an increasingly demonised ‘Western alternative’.

In fact, this picture of contentment seems to demolish the liberal idea of Russians cowering under an increasingly authoritarian regime, just waiting to be rescued back to democracy.

Other polls show that Russians aren’t particularly impressed with the government’s handling of the financial crisis; nor do they support Putin’s increasingly overblown vendetta against Khodorkovsky (59% think the trial is designed to line the pockets of those benefitting from Yukos’s collapse, and 75% oppose keeping him in prison for life).

So, is there just some sort of weird masochism at play in the Russian soul?

But if so, then why should Putin falsify elections that he could have expected to win anyway?

That is the central question. Why on earth did the Kremlin bother to delete Mitrokhin’s vote for a party, Yabloko, whose popularity had never risen above the low single digits even in free elections? What’s the point?

Similarly, much has been said about the ‘rehabilitation’ of Stalin. And yet, authorities have been cracking down on organisations and academics that have been researching the gulag and the deportation of Germans - measures that I can bet actually increase Stalin’s popularity in the eyes of his current fans, so why hush them up (especially in the internet age)?.

What is the Kremlin’s game? Seriously, I’m Russian, but I have no idea what is going on.

Vladimir Putin has a history of truly bizarre spontaneous gestures, such as kissing a terrified boy on his stomach or stealing Superbowl rings from visiting dignitaries. So what was so odd about him giving a passing factory worker his $10000 Swiss watch as a memento yesterday?

For a start, writes Luke Harding, “Putin’s penchant for expensive watches has raised questions about how he can afford them, given his relatively modest official salary. In 2007, Russia’s GQ magazine noted that the then president was sporting a yellow gold Patek Philippe watch, worth an estimated £51,000″.

This might be a serious question for an English journalist, whose country’s political system nearly collapsed over some MPs mowing their lawns at taxpayer expense, but not for ordinary Russians accustomed to the daily venality of their leaders.

No, what makes this story interesting is that in his watch-giving, Putin is clearly sending a cryptic message.

After all, this is the second time in a month that he has given away a watch: “Last month, in a moment captured by Kremlin photographers, Putin gave away another watch to the small son of a shepherd”.

Is it a coincidence that Putin’s largesse comes in the same week as Medvedev’s announcement that “has refused to rule out running for a second term as Russia’s president“?

Could Putin, who also “hinted that he was thinking of coming back in 2012″, be sending a Nabokovian message to his increasingly assertive protege?

Something like  “Your time is running out”, or “You are President on borrowed time”, or “I am watching you”?

Indeed, the BBC’s Bridget Kendall notes that Medvedev “pointedly did not endorse Mr Putin’s view that they would work [the succession] out between them” and “seemed to try to distance himself from his benefactor, as if to assert his right to hold an independent view”.

And while she goes on to conclude that Medvedev remains “the junior partner in a dance where his mentor calls the tune”, Putin has not been taking any chances:  alongside the watch he gave to the young shepherd was also a knife.

If a newspaper has seen four of its journalists assassinated in 8 years for their investigative reporting about Russia’s power elite, would it launch a new series exploring the murky relationships between the Kremlin, big business and oil?

If it’s Novaya Gazeta, it’s a yes.

The latest article, called “Friends of the Premier”, charts Putin’s links to the Rotenberg brothers, Arkady and Boris. And what a story!

Arkady Rotenberg went from being Putin’s judo partner back in the old days. to a seemingly invincincible banker and entrepreneur:

In 2008, Rotenberg purchased a 10% share of Novorossiysk port, ‘labelled in the Spiegel as ‘one of the most criminal of the many ports in this huge country that are largely controlled by crooks’.

In the same year, reports Novaya Gazeta, the Russian state monopoly Gazprom sold Rotenberg 5 building companies, which through a series of holding companies were used in building infrastructure for Gazprom itself. The article goes into much more depth detailing the various murky transactions.It also delves into Rotenberg’s ties to a millionaire senator named Leonid Lebedev, as well as ties to several dodgy Americans.

In its incessant framing of Putin as an authoritarian bogeyman to Yeltin’s flawed capitalist reformer, the mainstream Western narrative often loses sight of the Kremlin’s coziness with capital. And it is money, not ideology and not even power that acts as its main raison d’etre.

This financial motivation, often overlooked in favour of more emotive narratives featuring nationalism or ideology, is the catalyst for repression in Russia. Unfortunately, ideas are not yet valued highly enough to kill for.

Within such a system, writes Lilia Shevtsova, “[Putin] appears to see himself as the ‘CEO of Russia’ and he and his colleagues view Russia as a business corporation.”

Adds Sean Guillory in his excellent analysis: “At the heart of every corporation is subordination, productivity, and management, management, and more management. Like a CEO, Putin’s power is rooted in the company’s shareholders, the Russian elite. Putin’s CEO mentality plus the elite’s propensity toward self-destruction makes their relationship symbiotic. Putin’s power is reliant on the elite as much as their power is reliant on Putin”.

Let’s set aside politics and morality and ask: Does Russia Inc. succeed on its own terms? The answer to this question alone will determine the system’s longevity.

In an article commemorating Putin’s 10 years at the helm, the Moscow Times’s Natalia Kraimova notes:

“A review of today’s top politicians reveals a motley group that appears to be held together by Putin’s will alone and would probably collapse if Medvedev’s and Putin’s paths ever diverged…Many officials appointed by Putin “occupy their posts exclusively by Putin’s grace and often to the detriment of professionalism,” said Alexei Mukhin, an analyst with the Center for Political Technologies”.

Based on this, is a board-room battle heading the CEO’s way?

In any other news week, the title of most amusing story would certainly have gone to the BBC for comparing Putin to a character out of Brokeback Mountain: “Photographs of a bare-chested Mr Putin riding a horse through mountain scenery may of course put some people…in mind of a recent Hollywood film about gay cowboys”.

But that was before Twittergatesk.

You’ve heard the story: “Russian attempt to silence dissident stopped the tweets“, “Root of Twitter’s woes lies in Russia“, etc etc.

According to the overwhelming narrative in the English language media, a plucky Georgian blogger (named George, natch), who also happens to be a John McCain supporter, was targeted by Russian cyber-warriors for speaking out against Russian aggression last summer.

But because it was too difficult to bring down a single web-page or twitter account, the government hackers decided to take down every social networking site in sight, just to silence the pesky truth-teller.

How do we know this? Well, because he said so. “I’m certain the order came from the Russian government”, said George, and the major English-language newspapers have literally taken the blogger’s word for it.

Only the BBC deigned to point out that “despite the blogger’s claims, security researchers say there is “no suggestion the attack was state-endorsed”.

He may of course be correct. After all, recriminations have been flying from both sides in recent days, with many in Russia remain unhappy at the decision to not ‘go all the way to Tbilisi’ and depose Saakashvili when they had the chance.  None of this would explain, however, why George was selected for special punishment amongst millions of like-minded bloggers, in Georgia and all over the world, who skewer the Russian government every day.

But even if all bloggers were not by definition the narcissists and hyperbolic self-promoters that they are, the absolute credulity of the elite free press during instances of such accusations against ‘official enemies’ is striking and rather scary. Moreover, it often seems that a burden of proof is only required when challenging the established point of view.

Indeed, just yesterday the New York Times condemned Russia’s exaggerated claims of genocide by Georgian troops in Ossetia: “It was as if senior Russian officials pulled out a dog-eared Soviet propaganda playbook that called for hurling the most outlandish charge, without recognizing that in the modern global media climate, their credibility would quickly suffer if the facts proved otherwise”.

It would have been a compelling article, had the same paper that decried crude Russian propaganda itself not been so willing to swallow the Georgian variety.

“Our future is certain; it’s the past that keeps changing’ was how Soviet dissidents lamented the re-writing of history.

If only they knew what was coming! Today’s Russia may have lost the certainty of a Communist future, but certainly not the state’s stranglehold over the past.

Russia is not alone, of course. The teaching of history is highly political in every country, including the US, where textbook publishers are caught between the  ‘conflicting desires to promote inquiry and indoctrinate blind patriotism’, according to James Loewen in his book ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me’.

‘The Great Republic, The American Way, Land of Promise, Rise of the American Nation. Such titles differ from all other textbooks students read in high school or college’, Loewen writes. ‘Chemistry books are called Chemistry or Principles of Chemistry, not Rise of the Molecule’.

Such propaganda can be found in countries as diverse as Turkey, Israel and Japan, the last recently accused of officially white-washing the WWII era crimes committed in Okinawa.

Yet Russia stands out for its government’s increasingly zealous and paranoid backtracking on an issue so central to the very raison d’etre of post-Communism: the reclaiming of history by the people.

Nowhere has this symbolism been stronger than in the recent spate of attacks on Memorial, a human rights NGO that was started during glasnost to unearth and catalogue the victims of Stalin’s Gulag.

Break-ins into its archives and seizures of hard-drives have culminated in the shocking murder of Memorial member Natalia Estemirova in Chechnya earlier this month. While Estemirova’s death was likely a result of her role in investigating much more recent history, the fact that groups like Memorial, which formed the avant garde of the Soviet democracy movement, are being targeted threatens one of the few tangible achievements of the post-Soviet system.

Recently, an Orwellian ‘Historical Truth Commission’ has been established, and the parliament is considering ‘legislation that would make it a criminal offence to “infringe on historical memory in relation to events which took place in the Second World War”‘.

Meanwhile, in addition to banning independent history websites, Putin-Medvedev have launched a chilling probe into history textbooks.

This is not the first time that the leadership has taken issue with textbooks; what is most shocking is that the book currently under fire was itself a government-mandated re-write.

When it appeared in 2007, that edition of ‘Russian History from 1945-2007′ provoked a massive outcry for, among other things, designating Stalin ‘an effective manager’.

Today, in a plot twist worthy of the Great Manager himself, the toady authors responsible are being summoned by the very people who endorsed them two years ago to explain the book’s abject lack of patriotism.

Russia’s current War on History is worrying for many reasons, not least because of one unnerving trend: unlike in most other countries, where anti-American, anti-Western and pro-authoritarian feeling tends to be concentrated among the poor and uneducated, in Russia the more affluent and educated are also the most anti-American.

A recent article notes this ‘paradox of the educated Russian — education and professionalism do not translate into a wish for a greater democracy in Russia. Most Russian yuppies wholly embrace the Kremlin’s official interpretation of national ideologies’.

Certainly, many Russians have a legitimate reason to feel aggrieved by the dominant ‘Western’ narratives about the events of the 20th century, written, as ever, by the ‘victors’.

Who can deny that the likes of John Lewis Gaddis are responsible for gross ideologically driven inaccuracies relating to Russia’s role in WWII and the beginnings of the Cold War?

Yet there is enough actual history out there to compete with these silly mainstream narratives, and the last thing that sophisticated, independent scholars like William Appleman Williams, Walter La Feber and Stephen Cohen need is a helping hand from the Kremlin.

The ‘Russian account’ of history can speak for itself, thank you very much.