As if the actual invasion had not blown up in his face enough already, Saakashvili decided to score another own goal - this time with a virtual one.

On Saturday evening, countless Georgians saw what they believed to be news reports of a Russian invasion. What happened then resembled the aftermath of the original broadcast of HG Wells’s War of the worlds:

Mobile phone networks became inundated with panic calls and went dead’. the BBC reported. ‘Some people even started packing their bags, fearing a repeat of the August 2008 Georgia-Russia war’.

But it all turned out to be a hoax, orchestrated by ‘Imedi TV, the private, pro-government channel’, to ’show that there was a genuine danger of a Russian invasion’.

The reason for the action was predictable and came straight out of the post-Soviet playbook - to rally the country around an external enemy, but most importantly, to discredit opposition politicians as Russian proxies.

This is something that authoritarian politicians do all the time, and the fact that Saakashvili has done it this time should not be a surprise, because for all his Westernising posturing, he remains inextricably tethered to the Soviet-apparatchik mould. Like Yuschenko, like Timoshenko, Aliev, Yanukovich, Putin, Medvedev and indeed every single other political leader of a post-Soviet state, with the possible, but not necessarily actual, exception of the Baltics.

Moreover, the fact that the stunt was broadcast on Imedi TV should immediately ring bells. For Imedi TV is the Georgian equivalent of NTV, the once-independent Russian TV channel taken over by the Kremlin.

As the BBC reports,

[Imedi TV] was once owned by Badri Patarkatsishvili, a wealthy critic of the Georgian president.

Police stormed its studios in 2007 at the height of opposition protests, sparking criticism about media freedoms since President Saakashvili’s rise to power in 2003.

Uncertainty now surrounds the ownership of Imedi TV, which is at the heart of a wider debate about freedom of speech in Georgia.

This is virtually identical to the fate of NTV, which was once owned by Gussinsky, a wealthy oligarch who eventually fell from grace and became exiled.

The point of all this is that, 20 years after the fall of the USSR, there remain no ‘good guys’ at the helm of the ensuing states, just ‘our sons of bitches’ and ‘theirs’, to use FDR’s words about Somoza.

What have Eastern European people gained from the West’s playing off one set of crooked authoritarian apparatchiks (Saakashvili, Yuschenko) against another (Putin, Lukashenka)?

Every time, the pattern is the same: we are told that they are beacons of democracy/transparency/free enterprise/entry to Europe against the nefarious pro-Russian ‘old guard’. And every time, they reveal themselves to be no different, and in many cases, worse, at least if you compare the popularity ratings of ‘democrats’ such as Yuschenko against ‘authoritarians’ such as Putin.

The latest stunt from Saakashvili should cause Western opinion makers to ponder carefully their approach towards ‘packaging’ the post-Communist states to the population at large. They should start to treat the block as a coherent whole with common problems, common heritage, and, hopefully, a common democratic destiny rather than playing them off of each other, which will only bring out the worst qualities in everyone.

Let’s have no more illusions.

Who celebrates International Women’s Day anymore?

100 years since its inception, the venerable event could use a lift.

While it remains an official national holiday in Russia, time and government cooptation have dulled its radical roots as it transformed into an apolitical celebration of femininity and spring time – a sort of Eastern European Mother’s Day.

What’s more, many, especially on the right, consider it a weird anachronism left over from communist times.

Of course, the real anachronism is the growing lag between men and women in earnings, rights, social power and political representation since 1989. And that’s why the purpose of Women’s Day – the empowerment and liberation of women – remains more vital today than ever, especially in eastern Europe and Russia.

Even under the USSR’s avowed dedication to female equality, Soviet women chafed under the double burdens of full time work and full time housewifery. Also, they tended to be over-represented in the lesser paying professions.

Yet nothing could have prepared them for the catastrophic changes that took place after 1991, when economic crisis and a popular shift to the right that continues today conspired to roll back the clock. Not to mention the explosion of women trafficking from Eastern Europe (notoriously celebrated by Anne Applebaum).

For all the euphoric talk of post-communist freedom and liberation, abortion and employment rights have been systematically curtailed in virtually all post-Communist countries.

In her scholarly article Feminism and Post Communism, Nanette Funk writes that

In virtually all post-communist countries, there is a tendency towards a re-positioning of women away from the workplace and into the family. Women are thus 64% of the unemployed in the former GDR, 80% in the former Soviet Union, and 60% in Bulgaria” (Funk, 1993)

Indeed, one of the biggest tragedies/crimes of post-Soviet Russia has been the massive ‘feminisation of poverty’:

A 1998 paper found that

Unemployment and employment discrimination against women in Russia have reached epidemic proportions. Throughout Russia, women on average represent two-thirds of the unemployed, while in some provinces they account for more than 90 percent of the unemployed. Women in Moscow, for example, represent 78 percent of the city’s out-of-work residents. They also make up a large part of a new category to which Russians have only recently been introduced: the working poor”.

Since then, Putin’s governments, with their emphasis of pro-natalist politics and macho posturing, have hardly become renowned for their feminist stance.

As late as 2001, Suzanne LaFont argues in her paper titled ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Women in the Post Communist States that ‘democracy, rather than diminishing gender discrimination, has widened the gender gap through declines in women’s political representation and increases in women’s unemployment and underemployment’.

However, there have been some hopeful signs.

For example, despite continued hardships, the Central Asian ‘Stans’ have seen some improvements in women’s rights and equality, where the otherwise ruthless regimes have enacted progressive measures like quotas in the face of opposition from traditional religious and social forces.

And, despite containing such cringe-inducing lines as “March 8 today is a bright, joyous spring holiday [that reminds us that] we will always value in woman her original qualities – tenderness, elegance, charm”, Putin’s March 8 address sounded some of the right notes, including an emphasis on

The framework of the struggle for the interests of women, for their equal rights with men. In this connection and in this sense we in Russia have yet very much to do – both in the sphere of the protection of maternity and childhood and in the sphere of women’s access to various kinds of activities, equal pay, equal labour conditions. I must say it frankly – we have something to work on here still.

Hopefully one day soon Women’s Day will accomplish its goals and indeed become an anachronism, in Russia and elsewhere. Until then, it acts as a vital reminder to hold his –and society’s - feet to the fire.

If you know your internet memes, you’ve probably already met Eduard Hill, the ‘Soviet Rick Astley’ whose somewhat sinister lip-synched song is being sent by scores of bemused American hipsters to their unwitting friends.

Meanwhile, their counterparts in the Russian blogosphere are getting fired up by a much more literal car crash; in which a senior LukOil executive collided with a car carrying a respected doctor and her daughter, killing them both.

As is often the case, a cover up appears to have taken place. In response,reported the Moscow Times,

a public outcry began to swell as Moscow radio stations dedicated hours of debate to whether the accident showed that the notoriously corrupt police were little more than a force to protect the country’s strong from ordinary citizens. The crash quickly became the most-discussed topic in the Russian blogosphere.

Even if the internet outcry will force e-justice to be served, the incident exposes a failing that, more than ‘Kremlin authoritarianism’, poses the greatest obstacle to democracy in Russia: it is this rudimentary lack of rule of law, or rather, a rule of law that so crudely mirrors and reproduces the power divisions of a highly fractured society.

On Thursday, three more people died ‘mysteriously’ in police custody, the cop that killed a journalist got off lightly, and innocent people continue to get swept up in law enforcement operations, without redress.

Last week, at the start of his Strasbourg challenge, Khodorkovsky said that ‘Russia’s law enforcement system — from field detective work to court verdict — “is in essence a business that deals in legalizing the use of force”.

Whatever one may think of Khodorkovsky and his guilt or innocence, it is hard not to agree.

Once the foreigners who dared to push Russia from the podium have been taken care of (via strategic bombers and lethal psychological warfare), heads will roll over the country’s worst Olympics in history, assured Medvedev yesterday.

But whose?

Well, sports minister Vitaly Mutko says it wasn’t his fault; it was the stoopid new sports, dastardly doping tests, and God’s hatred of Russians. Seriously.

In an interview, Mutko unbelievably declared that:

1. New sports such as freestyle skiing that “no one takes seriously” in Russia have allowed other countries to race ahead

2. Luck was not on the country’s side; and that

3. Doping bans had also deprived Russia of several leading medal contenders.

Some have called for the blood of Leonid Tyagachev, the head of Russia’s Olympic Committee. Others have demanded the resignation of Patriarch Kiril instead: a joke points out that Tyagachev brought back decent-enough medal hauls from Salt Lake and Turin, until the Patriarch took the unprecedented step of blessing the athletes.

Yet the recrimination over Vancouver is the least of Russia’s problems.

In today’s Christian Science Monitor, Fred Weir describes the utterly shambolic state of preparations for Sochi 2014.

Indeed, while Russia’s sports may have lost their world-beating Soviet training style, its politics remain firmly wedded to the USSR’s heroic, ‘at any price’ prestige projects.

Without fail, the Sochi games have been hobbled by unprecedented corruption, enormous environmental degradation, widespread restrictions on press freedom, an opposition campaign from the Georgians and looming threats from the separatist Caucasus region next door. Oh, and did I mention the city’s subtropical climate - a less-than-perfect fit for winter games?

But what are such trifles when Putin’s personal reputation is on the line?

Even some Americans were offended when commentator Mike Milbury excoriated Russia for their ‘Eurotrash game’ against Canada. But what other way was there to describe the studied, ironic detachment of Ovechkin, or the arrogance and entitlement of that underachieving yet pampered sore-loser- Plushenko.

Not even his self-awarded Platinum Medal (NO JOKE!) could prevent the end of Russia’s half-century dominance in the sport, or his own countrymen from turning away in disgust from their former hero.

And, although Plushenko called Lysacek ““not a true champion” because he had won without performing a difficult quadruple jump”, the grace and sharpness of the American’s simple reply proved otherwise: ‘I guess I was a little disappointed that someone who was my role model would take a hit at me in probably one of the most special moments of my life’. Ouch.

How has it come to this?

Some have blamed the giant brain drain of talented coached, which has decimated the talent pool and drawn the best talent away from Russia. Others have pointed to the dilapidated training and equipment conditions, the lack of resources.

However, while true, these factors have existed since the early 1990s, when Russians remained comfortably in front. In fact, if anything, the training conditions, money, and access to coaches have all improved over the years as the country has grown richer, more stable, and more internationally integrated; yet the country’s Olympic results have trended in the opposite direction.

Curiously, Alexander Arkhangelsky has suggested that this might be a good thing. Because Olympic success typically favours either outright dictatorships (USSR, China) or full democracies (USA, Germany), Russia’s current Olympic “disgrace is evidence of the fact that our poor-rich country has not degraded into unequivocal tyranny”. That’s nice!

No, the real reason for the country’s sporting slump has been not Russia’s poverty, but it’s growing decadence. The country once known for its ascetic, Spartan and collectivist approach to sport is now all individual superstars, image and glam: its modern heroes ‘have turned into a fun-loving group that is a great host’.

For example, in Turin, what the Russian team lacked in medals they made up for in epic parties.

All this has led one Russian commentator to remark that in terms of discipline, work ethic, and team work, the Russians and the Canadians had switched places!

Indeed, while all the hype and champagne (or, in Arshavin’s case, some fine, pre-match cognac n’ sheeshah) was steadily getting to the Russians’ heads, the Americans and Canadians kept theirs down at the training ranch.

The results are clear and inevitable.

‘Khodorkovsky was the only one of the oligarchs who forgot that he was an oligarch, that is, a crook. He decided that because he’d stopped stealing from the company that he was a great businessman, a builder of value! The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But Khodorkovsky forgot.’

That vivid distillation of Khodokovsky’s essence appears in Keith Gessen’s elegant and accurate essay published in the latest edition of the London Review of Books.

In his review of Richard Sakwa’s new book, Gessen, a native Russian who has covered the Politkovskaya trial for the New Yorker, gets to the bottom of Khodorkovky’s many paradoxes:

How could this ‘nice guy’, with his ‘gentle demeanour…simple, down-to-earth manners [and] roll-neck sweaters’, end up making a fortune by ‘nickel-and-diming the wealth of the nation’? By speculating on the inflation prone roubles invested into his bank by’ the Russian population for whom the price of bread went up while salaries and pensions stagnated’, and then scoop up priceless state assets at Black Friday rates?

How was it that, ‘as the “transition” to capitalism continued in the early 1990s, Khodorkovsky grew increasingly powerful without growing correspondingly obnoxious’, despite ’some unlovely manoeuvres’, as when ‘a truckload of important financial documents happened to fall into the Dubna River’ or when he ‘threatened to dilute the value of Yukos shares down to zero if minority shareholders didn’t sell out to him at his price’?

And finally, after he had already been fingered by Putin’s goons, how could he have ‘refused to run…refused to sell out his friends…refused to back down’ in the face of an imminent downfall?

Reminding us that ‘a spirit of optimistic, strategic denial seems to have been at the core of Khodorkovsky’s project from the very start’, Gessen concludes that in the end, he simply ‘began… to believe his own press’.

But refreshingly, Gessen continues beyond the personal and to the structural. The 1990s were less a tale of individual human villainry than of a perverse system of rewards that led smart nice guys like Khodorkovsky to go terrible things.

‘Really, it’s the money’s fault’, he writes, and continues:

Loans-for-shares became the historical flashpoint for anger at the way the 1990s privatisation was conducted. But the deeper cause of this anger was the lawlessness that allowed a small group of people to become very wealthy while everyone else came to fear for their lives.

The most frustrating thing about Khodorkovsky is that he is not the killer that Putin’s men allege he is. But yet, all through the 90s, scores of people have died.

Writes Gessen:

‘Someone killed all those people, shot up their cars, and threw grenades inside just for good measure. Someone – or many people, acting separately – spilled a lot of blood during the 1990s, and we don’t know who it was.

While this was happening, someone also privatised Russia’s immense oil wealth, avoided taxes, thereby bankrupting the government, which, since it had to finance a war in Chechnya, and also the lifestyles of its own officials, cut back on hospitals, so that patients, when they arrived at those hospitals, were much more likely to die. It would certainly be simpler if the murderers and the privatisers were one and the same.

This is the line that Putin has taken.

While the Russian authorities like to compare Khodorkovsky to Al Capone, Gessen astutely chooses a much closer parallel: Bernie Madoff.

Here was another ambitious, clever man whose undoing stemmed largely from his own naivite and self-delusion, and whose exaggerated punishment -150 years- was also a very political one.

Both men embodied the essence of their age; far from being some sort of sick anomalies, they merely reached for the low hanging fruits available to those who best espouse the dominant values of the culture: in the case of 90s Russia and 2000s America - the culture of financial speculation.

In fact, the parallel to Madoff runs much deeper: at its core lie the values and rewards of a capitalist system that led those two men to do what they did, and the similarity between Obama and Putin’s approach to economic crimes and their redress.

Both governments used the high profile dressing down of a fall guy - Madoff/ Khodorkovsky - to obscure their unwillingness to address the deep structures that produced and nourished not only the bad guys in question, but also themselves.

For even as Khodorkovsky and Madoff languish in jail, Putin was brought into power and remains propped up by Khodorkovsky’s heirs (Prokhorov, Lisin, etc), while Obama has spent public trillions to preserve the same economic system that nurtured not only Madoff - but also his own finance-saturated presidency.

Perversely, Khodorkovsky and Madoff’s were guilty only of their success at the only game in town. And by blaming the (best) players, cynical Russian and American elites have adeptly avoided blaming the game itself.

Russian people are used to humiliation and oppression, but they always draw the line at Lake Baikal.

This is a lesson that PM Vladimir Putin should have considered carefully before giving his chum and Russia’s richest man Oleg Deripaska (pictured above) the green light to begin polluting the UNESCO-protected national treasure.

When the Soviet government decided to build the Baikalsk cellulose plant which now belongs to Deripaska on the world’s largest and most pristine freshwater lake to “produce a “super” cellulose that could be used to make durable jet tires for Soviet Air Force planes” back in 1954, it had laid the seeds of its own destruction.

Indeed, mere months after the death of Stalin and with memories of the GULAG still tragically fresh, “people who had mutely obeyed the Soviet government for 40 years finally howled in protest”: “Local scientists, writers, fishermen, and ordinary citizens banded together to fight the plant, igniting an environmental movement that was a direct forebear of all Soviet activism to come”.

In fact, Putin had been defeated at Baikal once before, when pressure from environmental groups forced him to re-route an oil pipeline in 2006.

This time, the prime minister has cynically made use of the economic crisis to  adopt the rhetoric of jobs creation as a rationale for reopening the paper mill.

Yet critics have pointed out that, contrary to official numbers of 16000, the mill never employed more than 2500 workers.

And besides, the closure of the mill last year actually augured scores of new job prospects in eco-tourism. One such hopeful entrepreneur was quoted as saying: “There are very few regulations for tourism or the environment here. We want to encourage tourism but so that locals and the lake benefit, not big companies.”

That, of course, is the crux of the matter. Whereas the Soviet pollution of the Baikal was driven by the prerogatives of the arms race, the current government is motivated only by greed and securing the loyalty of the oligarchs; the last thing it is interested in is loosening the grip of big business.

However, Putin may not have much choice but to relent:

According to the WWF, “over 30,000 people have already signed a petition asking President Dmitry Medvedev to prevent what could become and environmental catastrophe and cancel the government decree which puts short-term financial interests above a sustainable future for the world’s largest lake”.

Demonstrations were held over the weekend all across Russia, including my hometown, Murmansk, where “ecologists collected 300 signatures protesting the reopening of the Baikal plant” and even called on Putin to resign.

Meanwhile, in an article by Tom Balmforth, Carnegie’s Nikolai Petrov said: “I think it is almost inevitable that the Kremlin will repeal the decision. If you bear in mind that very little can be done by the government in order to pacify the protestors, and if you look at the history of the protest of the oil pipeline – they were a constant headache for the Kremlin”.

He would be wise to listen carefully to the protesters, for the sake of his political future: According to Prof. Douglas Weiner, the Soviet ecological movement that first mobilised around Lake Baikal remained under the official radar because ‘the regime’s perceptual apparatus didn’t allow it to see nature-protection as political speech or having counter-culture potential’. Until it was too late.

Now that Yanukovich has won, has Ukraine finally rejected the Orange Revolution and returned to Russia’s fold?

Not so fast.

In one of the great ironies of the election, Yanukovich’s clean campaign and victory in the most transparent election in his country’s history embodied the values of the 2004 revolution that ousted him, while Timoshenko’s refusal to accept defeat demonstrated a betrayal of her own pro-democracy movement.

For the Ukrainian people, this election was not about the country’s orientation towards Russia or the West: Both candidates offered a pragmatic rapprochment with their Eastern neighbour, while the US, notably, sat on the sidelines - a welcome indication of Obama’s saner Europe policy. If anything, Yanukovich has frequently stressed his independence from the Kremlin (announcing his first visit to Brussels, not Moscow), and it was Timoshenko, not Yanukovich, whom the Kremlin had earlier looked forward to doing business with.

That the voters rejected Yuschenko not because of his pro-Western stance but his failures to curb corruption and improve the economy proves that, despite the neo-con spin, it was those basic issues - and not some mythical cold-war clash - on which the Orange Revolution itself was built.

For despite all their divisions concerning Russia, Ukrainians are united in their anger at the lack of political transparency and economic performance, and the success or failure of Yanukovich’s government will depend on fixing the everyday problems dogging ordinary people, not on geo-politics.

The escalating war between Putin and House Speaker Sergei Mironov, who is being pressured to resign for daring to criticise the budget and the Prime Minister by name on national TV, may be just the opposite of what it seems.

“Do not try to bend the spoon. Try to realize the truth: there is no spoon”

To recap:  Mere days after a massive unsanctioned demonstration in Kaliningrad called for Putin’s resignation last weekend, Mironov, the number three figure in the Russian goverment and member of a recently created ‘loyal opposition’ Just Russia party, told a national television talk show that he disagreed with Mr. Putin’s budget and economic-crisis plan, characterising Putin’s program as one of “doubtful conservatism.”

As Putin’s name has rarely been so publicly attacked, Mironov was immediately called on to resign, even from members of his own party, for “dishonesty and inconsistency in regard to Vladimir Putin - a person who has done so much for the country and its people.”

Some analysts, however, believe that “the sudden scandal was in fact an attempt to move the media spotlight away from Kaliningrad”, which seriously rocked the ruling elite, in favour of a manufactured controversy involving the non-threatening Mironov.

According to the Communist Party’s Sergei Obukhov, “two boys are imitating a fight to get public attention away from the problems that led to the mass protest erupting in the Kaliningrad region.”

“Both of these parties – United Russian and Just Russia – as has long been known, are the right and left legs of today’s authorities,” a KPRF’s press secretary told the Kommersant news daily, referring to the fact that the Just Russia party was the product of a merger of two pervious Kremlin-created parties: Rodina and the Party of Life, possibly with the goal of syphoning off left wing votes from the Communists.

The very existence of a guessing game about the authenticity of the Mironov incident reflects the enduring prevalence of what the political scientist Andrew Wilson has called ‘virtual politics’.

Virtual politics involves using political technologies such as establishing fake political parties to syphon off votes from  genuine opposition parties, using ‘kompromat’ or blackmail, or choreographing political distractions, in order to preserve the status quo’s grip on power short of outright authoritarianism.

Particularly relevant to Mironov-Kaliningrad is Wilson’s concept of “dramaturgiia , which is the reshaping of politics as highly choreographed event, the concoction of stories to shift political events in one’s favour, or to sell a particular party or politician”.

On the other hand, Virtuality is not the only driving force of Russian politics; an equally strong current is patronage.

And Mironov’s falling foul of these rules  might offer an alternative explanation for his downfall, as explained inTom Balmforth’s Russia Profile article:

Although Mironov was fairly mild in his opposition, ‘there are certain rules in Russian politics,’ said Alexei Makarkin, a political analyst at the Center for Political Technologies. ‘If someone pushes forward your career, for instance, installs you as the speaker of the Federation Council (in this case, it was then-president Putin) and you then distance yourself from him when he is in a tough position, say, as prime minister during the economic crisis, well that runs against those principles,’ he said.

Indeed, an another political technologist said annonymously, “Mironov shouldn’t have used Putin’s name three times in a negative context; better to have just criticised the budget”.

So which paradigm explains the Mironov brouhaha?

I am inclined to think ‘all of the above’: a virtual distraction from the Kaliningrad riots, a slap-down for an uppity Mironov, and a warning/delineation of the limits of presidential criticism.

And, virtual or not, the episode did lead Mironov to publicly raise a key point about the current political system: “Do members of United Russia think that opposition and criticism is dishonest? In a civilized society this is the duty and goal of the opposition.”

Yet, when his party was created three years ago, Mironov saw its role very differently, saying:  “If United Russia is the party of power, we will become the party of the people…We will follow the course of President Vladimir Putin and will not allow anyone to veer from it after Putin leaves his post in 2008″.

Whatever the true meaning of the episode, it has called into question the long term possibility of a state controlled ‘loyal opposition’ : whether such an opposition will inevitably become either ‘real’ or simply be absorbed back into the ruling party.

When Tolstoy remarked that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, he might have been describing the recent anti-government protests in Russia.

On Sunday, I wrote about two ‘riots’: a civil disobedience action against the demolition of homes, and a political rally in defence of the right to organise, organised by the liberal democrats. Around the same time, there was another riot in Kant’s birthplace - Russia’s western enclave of Kaliningrad, against dire living standards.

Three groups of people, protesting three very different grievances in different ways, show the divergent ways in which an anti-Putin/Medvedev movement can be mounted.

The riots can be described as personal (against the seizure of private property in Rechnik), political (against the curtailing of constitutially guaranteed civil liberties) or economic (as in Kaliningrad, where one man explained the reason he was marching: “[United Russia's Governor] Boos promised us the same standards as the EU. It turned out he was lying”.)

Which type of opposition is most likely to gain critical mass among people and/or provoce the strongest concessions/repression from the government?

The answer depends on your interpretation of how the USSR collapsed:

whether through people power demands for democracy& human rights;

a popular push to respect the rule of law;

or as a result of the disintegration of a social contract that predicated loyalty to the Soviet state on its delivery of steady improvements in living standards.

One thing’s for sure: the latter rallies attract many more people than the political ones, while the government is continuing to favour guns over butter.