In the 1990s, the Russian film landscape had come to resemble something straight out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with stray dogs wandering through Mosfilm studios in Eisenstein’s footprints and actors and directors stumbling around a menacing no man’s land in search of money and meaning.

What happened before, and after, is the subject of an engrossing (and plenty flawed) BBC documentary entitled Movie Nights in Moscow on Radio 3, in which Oxford professor Rana Mitter travels to Russia and speaks to directors, academics and viewers to determine the state of cinema in Russia today.

This state can best be summed up by the following exchange between rising auteur Alexey Popogrebsky and renowned Soviet director (and current head of Mosfilm) Karen Shakhnazarov.

For Popogrebsky, the 2004 fantasy blockbuster Nightwatch was the turning point for Russian cinema, when

Young people said: maybe its not so bad to go watch a Russian film, because in terms of the return on their money, they were getting as many special effects per square foot as any other Hollywood blockbuster. Because people want to be entertained, they want to be impressed.

But for Shakhnazarov, who directed the iconic Glasnost youth movie The Courier and whose new film The Vanished Empire evokes 197os USSR, that is precisely the problem with modern Russian cinema. Speaking with an accent that lends heightened poetry to his words, he lays the blame even more on the viewer than film-maker:

In Soviet period, we had Idea. You can say it was bad idea, ok. You can say it was good idea, somebody says that. But it was an Idea. Around this idea was the fire; some life was around this idea. Somebody support this idea, and others not support it, those called dissidents. But, I mean, this was the really big idea. Now, it’s vanished. And so we have, in my opinion, our society have no anything to live for. Because its impossible to live just for have a lot of sausages in the shops. There’s no real idea for the people, you see?

I don’t think [viewers today] are searching for something like the Idea, I suppose. Or, very few of them want to find in cinema something that is called Idea. Just they want to go to see entertainment.

Of course, Mitter delves into the recent high quality Russian art-house fare such as the internationally acclaimed Paper Soldier, Volchok (Wolfy) and The Return.

But at a time when even commercial movies are seen only by elite upper middle class audiences who can afford to spend $10 on a ticket, the viewership of such ‘idea-films’ is so negligible that they can not hope to speak to the population at large.

And while Mitter proclaims the new cinema to be a renaissance equal to the colossal flowering of creativity and boundary-pushing under Glasnost in the 1980s (which he doesnt spend nearly enough time talking about!), he is wrong.

This is because the cinematic awakening under Glasnost was truly inclusive, rather than elitist; challenging films that today would be the preserve of art house audiences involved the general public in dialogues about their own pasts and debates about their futures.

Millions of ordinary people flocked to cinemas to see movies banned since the 60s, such as Kommissar and Abuladze’s anti-Stalinist Repentance, or new social realist films depicting the dark undersides of ‘Socialist utopia’ such as Little Vera (first Soviet film featuring nudity!); or films that re-examined the place of young people in society, such as Bykov’s The Scarecrow, Shakhnazarov’s The Courier, Igla (a film about drug abuse featuring Soviet rock legend Victor Tsoi) and the groundbreaking Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young.

While many of those films were heavy and depressing, (their darkness serving as a political rebellion against the culture of official cheerfulness that marked Socialist Realism), so many quality films were not: for example, the above-mentioned Courier or the satirical comedy Kin Dza Dza.

And there was not the same kind of apartheid between highbrow ‘chernukha’ like Wolfy and commercial trash like Night Watch that we see today.

They were for the most part politically engaged and philosophically committed.

In the final scene of The Courier (2:55 in), the main character, Ivan, a high school senior, is watching some dudes breakdance in the park and asks his pal Basin: What do you dream about in life?

-Buying a winter coat

-What kind of dream is that?

-Winter is almost here and I’ve got nothing to wear; I went last winter without one and was sick all the time

-Cant your parents get you one?

-My dad’s paying alimony but my mum won’t give me a penny. Says I don’t need money. She is a sick person, there is no doubt. But what can you do?

At which point Ivan gives Basin the new jacket that his dad had just given him, and says:

-I won’t be needing it: I’ll get drafted into the army soon anyway. Wear it, and start dreaming of something greater.

He could have been addressing the new Russian cinema and its audiences.

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).

The Russian government may not have a stellar judicial record, as Khodorkovsky can confirm. Yet the fact that he is alive at all he owes to his country’s even worse democratic record.

You see, whereas “a recent survey shows around two thirds of Russians support the death penalty”, Medvedev and the Kremlin apparat are committed to extending Russia’s longstanding moratorium on executions in line with Protocol Six of the European Convention on Human Rights,” which prohibits the use of the death penalty in peaceful times”.

Mikhail Margelov, head of the foreign affairs committee of the Federation Council, was quoted by the BBC as saying:

In other countries, the death penalty has always been removed because of the will of the majority. [In Russia, ] the political elite are pitting their inclination for rational modernisation against the will of the people.

But over in America, democracy continues to claim lives.

Yesterday, Virginia executed the DC sniper.

Meanwhile in Texas, where 3/4th of its residents back the death penalty, the state has been representing popular will with such zeal that it has executed more people than any US state.

There, 444 convicts were killed in the last 3 decades, more than half as many since 1976 as in over 300 preceding years!

Thank god Russia’s political elites don’t care what its people want!

Don’t get me wrong: I cried as much as anyone when I watched the BBC 9 o’clock newscast from November 9, 1989.

In fact, it was precisely the raw human solidarity behind those unforgettable scenes that exposed the farcical, hypocritical and self-serving nature of the official commemorations marking the fall of the wall tonight.

Merkel, Sarkozy, Kohl, Obama: Not a single one of the leaders waxing lyrical about the fall of the wall is actually against walls per se. They are only against Communist walls, walls built by ‘bad guys’; but are perfectly fine with erecting ever new walls to keep out the poor and the brown, walls that keep the weak away in their place and the strong safe (indeed, not one of these leader has urged the tearing down of the one true heir to the Berlin Wall: the West Bank Barrier, which, unlike the Berlin Wall that only violated basic morality, also violates international law).

Consider this statement from the French president, who has recently uploaded a (fake) pic of him chiselling away the Berlin Wall on his facebook page:

‘The fall of the Berlin Wall serves for us all today as a call to fight oppression and to tear down all the walls that still separate the world, that divide cities, regions and nations’.

Yet this is the same man who less than a month ago staked out one of the most anti-immigrant position of any EU leader, and ‘called for clear steps to strengthen the European frontier security agency Frontex and a deal to be concluded with Libya to tighten its borders’.

And Merkel? This champion wall-slayer belongs to (albeit the less dogmatic wing of) an anti-immigrant party, the CDU, and has stated that immigration can only take place into Germany if it is well regulated and based on strict assimilation practices, angering human rights and Turkish groups. But when the East German government called for a ‘well-regulated’ migration policy, we all knew what that meant!

And what of the great Helmut Kohl, the architect of the fall of the wall itself?

He was all for giving all East German refugees West German passports to encourage a mass exodus from the GDR, but as for anyone else (ie. non-German, not running from Communism, non white, non Christian) wishing to come to Germany, his slogan was simple: ‘Germany is not an immigration country’.

Amazingly, in 1996, less than 6 years since reunification, he blamed  immigration (from poor and ethically different countries) for the unemployment caused by his disastrous economic policies, saying:

‘I don’t want to suggest that immigration is the major reason for unemployment, but it should be taken into account when one makes comparison with other European countries’.

And Obama? Last night, he said: ‘Like so many Americans, I will never forget the images of people tearing down the wall. There could be no clearer rebuke of tyranny, there could be no stronger affirmation of freedom’.

Fine words at a time when his own country is busy walling itself off from its impoverished southern neighbours, who, like the East Germans that everyone loves, just hunger for a better life.  In fact, last year alone, America held nearly 380000 immigrants in detention centres, according to a fine article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette.

Also last year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE…removed 369,211 immigrants from the country, a 27 percent increase from 2007.The agency is on pace to reach a new high this year. By Aug. 31, it had already deported 256,957 people’.

As the article says, ‘behind those numbers are complex stories of immigrants who came to the United States in search of economic opportunities and headed home in a cloud of uncertainty, often while family members remained here. Many will try to return, both legally and illegally’.

Families forcefully broken up, border fences erected and reinforced with barbed wire, people detained, shackled and deported. How is this any different from the Berlin Wall that Obama and his EU partners have so eloquently condemned?

As unfashionable as he has become since 1989, how right Marx was when he said that history appears the first time as tragedy, and the second as farce.

The Global South, it seems.

According to a BBC poll published on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, “opinion about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is sharply divided. Europeans overwhelmingly say it was a good thing: 79% in Germany, 76% in Britain and 74% in France feel that way.

But outside the developed West it is a different picture. Almost seven in 10 Egyptians say the end of the Soviet Union was a bad thing and views are sharply divided in India, Kenya and Indonesia”.

This despite the fact that India and Indonesia, as well as Russia, have experienced unprecedented levels of economic growth since 1991.

What could explain such nostalgia? One factor might be a general disenchantment with free-market capitalism:

“More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands. Almost a quarter - 23% of those who responded - feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil”.

Much of the global dissatisfaction with capitalism, the report suggests, stems from that system’s production and exacerbation of income inequality. While economies based on high growth models may produce more wealth as a whole, its distribution is skewed overwhelmingly in favour of a small minority.

High inequality is much worse for a nation’s wellbeing than low growth. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett convincingly show in their recently published scholarly work The Spirit Level (except from David Runciman’s excellent article in the London Review of Books):

Among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is.

No surprise then that, according to the poll, “there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries”.

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.

After twenty years of post-Communism, it’s time to ask: cui bono?

According to a sweeping Pew Research Center poll of Eastern Europeans released yesterday, “the prevailing view in Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Hungary is that people were better off economically under communism. Only in the Czech Republic and Poland do pluralities believe that most people are now better off”.

And within those societies, the primary beneficiaries of the transition were the elites.

“It was the young, the better educated and the urban populations who were cheering [the post-Communist order]. How older, less well educated and rural people would adapt was then identified as one of the principal challenges to acceptance of democracy and capitalism”.

Moreover, whereas communism may have offered, in Churchill’s famous dictum, an equal distribution of poverty, the fruits of democracy have been distributed very unequally indeed.

“There are now wide age gaps in reports of life satisfaction. In Poland, for example, half of those younger than age 30 rate their lives highly, compared with just 29% of those ages 65 and older. These gaps were not evident in 1991, when all age groups expressed comparably negative views of their lives”.

Moreover, an “urban-rural gap also is evident in life satisfaction…In Ukraine, for example, 30% of urban dwellers express high satisfaction with their lives, compared with just 17% of those residing in rural areas. These disparities in reports of well-being were not apparent two decades ago”.

Given the views about their material situation today vs under the former regimes, it is not surprising to find fewer people satisfied with the transition to democracy and capitalism:

(With regards to democracy itself, there is definitely a large split between Eastern Europe and the countries of the former Soviet Union, with the former being much happier with the political transition than the latter. One factor that might explain the popularity of the democratic transition in Eastern Europe is that it was essentially a process of liberation from an outside occupier, the USSR).

Ironically for a process that ushered in a new era of religious freedom in Eastern Europe, the transition to democratic capitalism assumed the very opposite trajectory to the one Jesus preached when he said that “the last shall be first, and the first shall be last” (Matthew, 19:30).

Instead, the transition quickly rectified the ‘unnatural’ order of the old regime- in which the first (the rich and talented) had temporarily been made last.

Henceforth, the masses-the old, the poor, the average and the rural-were returned to being last again, where they belong; so that the elite- the young, educated, talented and urban-could finally resume the rightful first place they occupied before the whole Communist/Christian debacle.

Terrified German officers called them Night-Witches. ‘Night’ because of the way they idled their engines to glide silently over German cities in daring night-time bombing raids. And ‘witches’, because they were women.

Today, the BBC aired an unmissable documentary about the legendary Soviet 46th Night Bombers Guards Regiment, the first female combat fighter pilots in the world.

It is a poignant story of thousands of women, many of them teenage girls, overcoming traditional gender roles to demonstrate extraordinary heroism in defence of their motherland.

But in focusing on two ace pilots in particular, it is equally a warning against the politicisation of WWII, which has lately been appropriated to show off nuclear missiles on Red Square, stir national chauvinism and even rehabilitate Stalin. So much so, in fact, that President Medvedev was recently moved to deliver an unprecedented attack on the revival of Stalin’s legacy.

The author-narrator, Lucy Ash, speaks with some of these last remaining heros, including Galina Beltsova, a highly decorated fighter pilot feted by the Kremlin. Beltsova recalls the fear of being captured by the Germans; tears spring to her eyes when describing the break-up of the USSR.

But then there is her comrade Anna Yegorova. Hit by anti-aircraft fire, badly burnt and with a damaged parachute, she fell to the ground, suffering serious injuries. “The most dreadful thing’, she recalls, ‘was opening my eyes and seeing Germans in front of me’.

She then spent 5 months in a Nazi concentration camp. Yet shockingly, what was more harrowing still was her treatment afterwards by her own people.

As soon as she was liberated from the camps, barely alive, she was dragged off to be interrogated by SMERSH counterintelligence. “They swore at me, said I was the scum of the earth, that i switched sides and joined the Germans; they treated me like an animal and called me a fascist bitch’, she recalls. When, after more than 20 years, she was formally rehabilitated and named a Hero of the Soviet Union,  she remembers, “I felt burnt out, I felt no joy or satisfaction. It felt numb. After the SMERSH tortured me, something within me died. God save anyone from such treatment”.

“Even after all these years’, concludes Ash, ‘Anna still struggles to reconcile the conflicting emotions inside her. The same could be said in larger relief about her country, and its tortured recollection of the war years”.

The same, indeed, could be said for the whole history of the USSR - a series of contradictions and paradoxes, leaps and retrenchments, spectacular heroism, as well as savagery, betrayal, love and achievement, done, often by the same people, to each other - which can no less be separated into discrete fragments than the elements of a human life.

To wit, “the Soviet Union was the first nation to allow women to fly combat missions. Women pilots in other countries flew military aircraft in support roles and some were fired on by enemies. But only Soviet women pilots could fire back; only Soviet women dropped bombs and fought in air battles”. And yet the same Soviet Union then tried to shut down these female squadrons once the war was over.

The Soviet Union which both Anna and Galina defended in the face of almost certain death, but which repaid one with gratitude and the other with torture; the Soviet Union of both SMERSH interrogators and of Night-Witches.

Conservative Russians and those of an anti-Western disposition argue, correctly, that all too often the West cares to know and focus only on the Soviet Union’s crimes, and not on its achievements - human, technological and military, including its central role in WWII victory.

But accepting the essential truth of this grievance bestows no corresponding right of amnesia; to do so would be to repeat the very ignorance and bias that they rightly denounce. For only those who lack faith in Russia, who doubt that there are enough Nightwitches and Sakharovs and Akhmadulinas to counter-balance the Stalins and Berias, can be afraid to confront the Soviet past head-on.

With a neo-con editor who believes that “with the Russians, if you don’t demand and threaten a little, you get zero”, the New Republic is the last place to find a reasoned view on Russia.  Or on Iran for that matter, considering this famously faux-liberal magazine’s hawkish anti-Islamic stance.

So imagine my surprise at finding just such an article today! Despite its traditional headline, “Putin’s Game: Why Russia won’t cooperate on Iranian sanctions” calmly and rationally  answers the quesiton of why Russia is so against Iran sanctions: national interest!

How does Russia benefit from its nuclear cooperation with Iran? Simple economics provides a compelling first answer: The Russian economy has not only reaped the benefits of the Bushehr deal, but it has also been bolstered by the sale of fuel and the potential sale of additional reactors. What’s more, the nuclear project is only one of many economic agreements between the two countries. Total bilateral trade hovers around $2 billion, as Russia supplies Iran with consumer goods, oil and gas equipment, and military technology. Russia also enjoys privileged access (along with China) to Iran’s Southern Pars gas fields.

Russia’s withdrawal of support for the Iranian nuclear program might jeopardize these other lucrative deals.

Seth Robinson also points out that Russia does not want to alienate Iran in its role as a ‘powerbroker in the Caspian oil trade’, whose “position on the Caspian Sea, which is estimated to hold more than 10 billion tons of oil reserves, makes it an important and influential partner for Russia”. Iran can be a key political ally, not just in Russia’s pipeline projects: Tehran “has pointedly refrained from criticizing Moscow’s Chechnya policy, and has held strategic meetings with Moscow on the Taliban”.

All this makes perfect sense. And it is telling that the aspect that has got the West into such a fit over an otherwise perfectly rational position, namely that “Russian nuclear cooperation with Iran provides the Kremlin with leverage over the United States”, is relegated to the final point, the icing on an economically and strategically nutritious cake.

So what should the takeaway be for the US administration? How can the US expect Russia to throw away all the tangible benefits that it reaps from its relationship with Iran just to satisfy American sanction-lust?

Indeed, far from taking the advice of the New Republic’s pycho editor Marty Peretz, Robinson recommends that “if the United States seeks true Russian support, it must find a way to compensate Moscow for the losses it will incur by forsaking Iran”.

After all, Russia is not intransigently opposed to sanctions on principle: “it is worth remembering”, writes Robinson, “that Russia has already supported multiple rounds of UN Security Council sanctions, but only those that have not imperiled its own interests”.

Such a dispassionate focus on interests and strategic alliances is the only sane way to counteract the still-prevalent tendency in the US media to treat international relations as morality plays between good and bad guys.

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.