“In America, there are many fewer good journalists than in Russia”, said Exile editor mark Ames before barely escaping with his life.

So now that the Exile has relocated to Panama and gone global, who will fill its gaping ulcerous void?

The FPA’s Russia Blog is launching an ongoing project to expose promising new alt-journalist talent to virgin Western eyes.

What sort of things are we (ie. just me, blogging alone in my windowless office, after work) looking for? Ideally, a toxic mix of non-preachy social consciousness, wry observation, sophomoric antics, modern aesthetics, political engagement, eclecticism and investigative reporting.

A tall order? Well, the Exile had set the bar high, but there are plenty of reasons for optimism. Russia has a burgeoning young literary scene, but one we in the West seldom hear about amidst all the din surrounding the state’s repression of the ‘respectable’ media, the sort of New York Times-style papers that would never have had the guts to cover such original protests as this , with or without government censorship.

So where do these fellows hang out? One place is Bolshoi Gorod (Big City) magazine. It’s a uber-cool mix of nightlife, style, literature and politics, with pieces like this but also some rather thought provoking social reporting. For example, the most recent issue carried a provocative series of interviews with the ‘invisible faces’ of nightclubs–the wardrobe attendants, cleaners and security guards.

BG’s sparse and ironical prose turned a potentially leaden and sanctimonious homily into an edgy and open-ended commentary on modern Moscow.

You get the idea.

This series will be frequently updated, so please send any tips this way!

What writers, magazines or papers would you nominate?

Forget Barack Obama: Medvedev is already the world’s first metrosexual leader.

Joel Stein recently wrote of the effeminate US Democratic presidential candidate in the LA Times:

“He’s well-dressed. He eats arugula (rocket) — which he buys at Whole Foods… He is, as we mentioned, quite thin. He may only be half-black, but he’s three-quarters gay”.

What a girl! Being thin, eating organic leaves and wearing an off the rack Burberry suit was the best Obama could do?

Once again, as with women’s tennis, robber barons, computer hacking, conspicuous consumption, espionage and racism, it falls to Russia to step in and show America how it’s done.

While it may have stalled a little regarding such incidentals as elections, a free press, tolerance for minorities and business transparency, Russia has made democratic history where it counts: by electing a president who appears to be more a puppet of GQ magazine than of Vladimir Putin.

Take this EASY QUIZ to see if YOU are a METROSEXUAL PRESIDENT!

1. When hosting an international summit, you give visiting heads of state gifts of:

a) Oligarch livers.
b) Silver scale models of the next generation T-90 tank
c) Signed albums of your own amateur photography, which include pictures of ‘Italian cherubs, a rowing boat bobbing on a dappled turquoise lake, ducks, and several landscapes’.

2. What is your favourite Crayola colour?

a) Bruised-Chechen Blue
b) Rib-eye Red
c) Deep purple

3. To relax, you:

a) go shirtless fishing
b) practice judo on little children
c) meditate

4. As a kid, you wanted to be:

a) a spy
b) leader of all the Russias
c) a lawyer

5. Outside of the office, you prefer to dress in:

a) a nuclear submarine commander’s uniform
b) just a strategically placed gun
c) turtleneck paired with a leather jacket

(ANSWERS: 5 Cs or more: Congratulations! You’re a Metrosexual President!

3 As or 3 Bs: Congratulations! You’re the new Prime Minister!)

A cursory analysis of Medvedev’s dress confirms the suspicions: Roped shoulders a la Tom Ford? Check. Waisted double vented shorter-than-average jacket? Check.

High lapels? Metrolicious!

Cheeky school-tie knot paired with uber-spread collar? Like, straight out of Gossip Girl!!!

And don’t neglect those nails!

Many commentators have attempted to paint Medvedev as little more than an extension of his predecessor. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In a radical departure, the new leader quickly jettisoned Putin’s boxy Brionis and his predictable, precision tied half-windsors.

But what does that tell us about his future foreign policy?

More than you might think!

Vladimir Putin’s preference for Brioni and Hugo Boss suits correlated perfectly with his close political ties to Berlusconi’s Italy and Schroeder’s Germany (Schoeder, too, apparently chose Brioni). Conversely, Putin was as circumspect of British tailoring as of its Berezovsky-shelterin’ Prime Minister.

Unlike his mentor, Medvedev is clearly a Saville Row man. Though we do not know exactly which tailor he uses, the subtly waisted cut and characteristic navy colour (preferred by the likes of Daniel Craig and Prince Charles) of several of his suits, together with his penchant for old-boy style asymmetrical tie-knots, points strongly to a W1S postcode.

Therefore, could the era of hostility and suspicion between Russia and the UK be drawing to a close?

It is too early to tell, but all those sceptical of sartorial power in international diplomacy should note the wonders Medvedev’s style has already done for Russia’s relationship with France.

The recent spat with America and Britain over Zimbabwe and Russia’s continued intransigence over the US AMB shield in the Czech republic have dashed the hopes of many in the West that Medvedev would make a qualitative departure from Putin.

The Guardian’s Luke Harding put it just so:

Medvedev’s hardline comments in one of his first major speeches on foreign policy since his inauguration in May are likely to disappoint western observers. They had hoped that his presidency might usher in a more conciliatory era in relations with the west.

However, whether one defines Russia’s position on these issues as anti-Western grandstanding or pragmatic self-interest, one thing is clear: the Russian press has been covering many sides of the story.

In the immediate wake of the Zimbabwe brouhaha, much of the reaction in the Russian mainstream news was refreshingly critical of the government’s policies.

For example, Vremya Novostei, a liberal but pro-government paper, contextualised the veto with a recap of recent moves by Russia to protect Burma and Sudan against Western reprisals. Then, it quoted Sergei Oznobischev, head of the Institute of Strategic Studies as saying that appeasing pariah states is a sure recipe for conflict with the West, and that the key to Russian great power status lies not in Burma, Zimbabwe or even China, but in partnership with Europe and the US.

Naturally, the government has not loosened its grip on the media, and that fact alone makes the appearance of such articles all the more interesting.

In a recent interview, former White House rebel Vladimir Ryzhkov drew a tentative parallel between Medvedev and Gorbachev. Gorbachev started out as a liberal, not a democrat. He wanted to democratise institutions in order to promote his vision of liberal humanism, not to have a free for all. Similarly, he started off with very cautious economic reforms, that began with a tinkering around the edges and concentrated on efficiency and market accounting mechanisms.

Medvedev has certainly started to tinker. Earlier this month, he announced that Gazprom, Putin’s Koh-i-Noor, would have to start sharing its pipelines with other companies. This was a pretty important announcement, as one of the things that made Gazprom such a threat to Europe was its ownership of both gas and pipelines: EU monopoly regulations forbade such things for its own companies, who ended up outflanked. Today came the news that Gazprom would lay off 500 executives, or 10% of the staff, at its head office.

It is too early to say whether Medvedev has any plans for a full fledged Perestroika. As the closure of the Exile has revealed, he’s not one for free for alls. Yet the critical press line and gentle economic restructuring may point to a liberal impulse that, like with Gorbachev, not only may come to fruition with time, but also be eventually overtaken by events.

Russia and China resisted putting on sanctions on Mugabe and now Britain and the US have been openly questioning Russia’s fitness to belong to the G8. Normally level-headed commentators have been feverishly proclaiming their disappointment in Russian collusion with dictators.

My first thought, however, was that the situation today in Zimbabwe is reminiscent of 1993/1996 Russia — violence to the opposition (Yeltsin’s bombing of the White House); massive voting fraud (1996 election); hyperinflation — or any number of contemporary Central Asian states. None of these have had sanctions imposed on them.

In the following rant, which reflects solely the ill-considered opinions of its author, allow me to introduce some reality into this moralistic, anthropomorphic hysteria:

1. The UN security council is a forum for international law and diplomacy, not a morality police. It is not the business of the members to tell other countries what political system they ought to choose.

2. Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe has indulged in political abuses but it has not killed, tortured or imprisoned any more people than has China, Morocco, Congo, Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Nepal or [insert authoritarian developing country here].

3. The UN Security Council is not designed to impose sanctions on states that rig elections. The vast majority of countries in the world rig their elections; others, like practically every Gulf and Central Asian state, don’t even bother to hold elections. Many more others suffer from hyperinflation, violent repression of the opposition and economic collapse.

4. Sanctions almost never work anyway.

5. Countries aren’t people. They aren’t good or bad, and they don’t have feelings or morals. They are entities with interests. Condemning Russia for the Zimbabwe sanctions on grounds of morality is childish and dangerous.

OK, rant over.

PS. A very interesting part of the whole incident has been the role played by the Russian media. There has been a lot of very robust criticism of the government in the newspapers.  That will be the subject of the next post.

Goodnight!

The exile is back…sort of. Newly reincarnated as the exileD, it is run out of “Putin-proof” Panama.

Fuelled by paypal donations from readers, the first edition came out on July 14, Bastille Day.  

Exile fans can be reassured, at least for now: despite bitter avowals to quit Russia for good, the issue contained the familiar by-lines of Edward Limonov, Mark Ames and War Nerd, a typically hard hitting article on political prisoners, and plenty of photos of scantily clad Russian girls, covered in mud.

Gone are the heady heroin nights of the nineties, and with them, many of the expats who had come East to trade in the drudgery of their suburban lives for a more visceral, tragic version of humanity.

Now that the country brims with the Toyota Priuses (Prii? Priux?), hipsters, libel laws, Time Out Magazine, nuclear families, decent sushi and the other assorted petit bourgeois nightmares of back home, what’s the point of putting up with a scary government and summary bureaucracy?

Indeed, to witness non-oligarchs holidaying abroad, taking up sales and marketing jobs and driving new model Ladas or even Peugeots can be very bittersweet. No matter how clichéd, the question begs asking: has the well-adjusted middle class life that has enriched the hitherto threadbare existence of so many (though still not even remotely the majority of) Russians cost us that self-destructive, protean, brooding, extremist yet spiritual truth seeking poetry - borne of suffering, longing, deception and isolation?

Has Russia lost, in a word…its SOUL??!

More chillingly, has said Soul been sold to a rentier state whose petrodollars drown questions of illegitimacy and oppression in the warm, moist umbilical fluid of light sweet crude?

Not quite! And here’s why:

1. The 90s Paradox:

The libertinism of moral clarity and/or cheap drugs, anarchy and play that the expat rebels revelled in proved catastrophic for their Russia’s own Rimbauds.

In fact, the Soviet enfants terribles of the 1980s: young guys trapped in obscure think tanks penning underground verse or music, hippies and political dissidents who shocked and shamed their bankrupt system in the same way that the Exile shamed and shocked its own, could not survive in the new climate.

Their rock music – filigreed, cryptic and high maintenance - didn’t stand a chance against Aerosmith or the Spice Girls. In a country drowning its collective sorrow in endless re-runs of Santa Barbara and The Bold and the Beautiful, no-one had the time or money for their now-permitted protest literature. Their well paying research jobs, at which they could comfortably sit and write, disappeared. Many sold out; for others, despair and the dulling embrace of heroin replaced the creative kick of vodka and kombucha tea.

By the end of the 1990s, the Soviet intellectual, dissident and underground scene effectively disappeared. In 1998, Claude Frioux had written its obituary in Le Monde Diplomatique:

Russia’s intellectuals are now entirely absorbed with questions of material survival, paralysed by a fear of displeasing somebody, and confused about how to deal with the mafia face of power….They are no longer the small islands of lucid dignity that they once were. They are now an amorphous mass, and outside observers comment dismissively on their cynical lack of concern and their total absorption in the business of making ends meet.

Even in Russia, people sitting in unheated flats and using furniture for firewood eventually switched from questions of philosophy to questions of finding scraps of food; undoubtedly in an homage to Bakhtin.

2. Biting the Hand that Feeds You:

A cursory look at instances of mass intellectual awakening/rebellion reveals that such events generally follow periods of increased material wealth and stability. 1968 is the obvious example. In Russia, it was no different. The impoverished and hellish 1930s and 40s gave way to the staid, authoritarian and materialistic 1950s. Yet before the decade was out, Khruschev’s famous Thaw began. Similarly, the wealthy, even ‘decadent’ years of Brezhnev’s stagnation (few in the West realise that Soviet living standards peaked in the mid 1970s, and that it was the time of every baby boomer’s life) preceded the grass roots rebellions of the late 1970s and early 80s that eventually paved the way for Gorbachev’s glasnost.

History shows that as soon as (but not a moment before) a country raises a generation of reasonably well fed, educated young people in an ordered, stable society, they will immediately proceed to do their best to undermine and destroy that society, tear up its sick, fraudulent and oppressive underbelly, and seek freedom. Before long, they will become bankrupt and bitter or ‘grown up’ and responsible, and the cycle will continue.

Thus, is it any surprise that after a decade of abject poverty and national trauma beginning in the late 1980s, Russia now witnesses an era of a materially comfortable, socially conservative authoritarianism?

Indeed, it would be useful to keep in mind an article by Other Russia leader Eduard Limonov that appeared in today’s Grani.ru newspaper.

In it, he writes that Putin’s authoritarian system will be overturned not by the impoverished masses, but by a growing wave of educated disaffected youth feeling stifled and demanding philosophical rather than material freedom. Thus, unlike with the masses, the regime’s capacity for delivering the goods economically would no longer be enough to save it.

So where is this new ‘class for itself’, these islands of lucid dignity? We don’t hear much about them in the West, but they are definitely out there. In the field, one group is Limonov’s own National Bolshevik Party foot soldiers, frequently arrested on trumped up sedition charges, and even occasionally killed. On the intellectual front, someone to watch is Kirill Medvedev, a young dissident writer, poet, activist and blogger whose work has recently been profiled by the dashing Russian-American factotum and animal lover Keith Gessen in his own thick journal n+1. What kinds of things can we expect from this new generation? Well, a recent essay posted on Medvedev’s site quotes the following poem:

Literature Will Be Tested
—
Entire literatures consisting of subtle turns of phrase
will be tested to prove
that where there was oppression,
there were also rebellions.
By the prayers of earthly creatures to heavenly beings
it will be shown that the early creatures trampled one another.
Their rarefied verbal music will testify
that many did not have enough to eat.

Don’t write off Medvedev’s Russia quite yet.

In today’s International Herald Tribune, Henry Kissinger delivers a very optimistic assessment of US-Russian relations in the post-Putin era. The king of realpolitik describes the Medvedev period as “a transition from a phase of consolidation to a period of modernization”, one which “may, in retrospect, appear as the beginning of an evolution toward a form of checks and balances lacking heretofore”. Indeed, “we are witnessing one of the most promising periods in Russian history”.

Whoa!! So what should this mean for US Russian relations?

Kissinger says that “Russian policy [is] driven in a quest for a reliable strategic partner, with America being the preferred choice”, and thus, the US should realise the benefits of cooperating with Russia on strategic issues including Iran and disarmament; issues on which, rhetoric aside, they have many common interests.

Kissinger also warns that “the movement of the Western security system from the Elbe River to the approaches to Moscow brings home Russia’s decline in a way bound to generate a Russian emotion that will inhibit the solution of all other issues”.

All this is very sensible advice indeed, and particularly welcome from the man who brought peace between the US and China, and who has also endorsed McCain for president. McCain would do well to adopt Kissinger’s pragmatic, open-minded and non-ideological approach.

A similar argument is presented, in the same newspaper, but from the opposite side of the political spectrum. Eminent Russia scholar Stephen F Cohen paints a vivid back story of where things went wrong between the two countries and echoes Kissinger’s call to cool-headed cooperation.

Cohen forcefully lays the blame for the recent Russian international bullishness on the US’s own post-Cold War policy of “bipartisan triumphalism”:

It meant that the United States had the right to oversee Russia’s post-Communist political and economic development, as it tried to do directly in the 1990s, while demanding that Moscow yield to U.S. international interests. It meant Washington could break strategic promises to Moscow, as when the Clinton administration began NATO’s eastward expansion, and disregard extraordinary Kremlin overtures, as when the Bush Administration unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty and granted NATO membership to countries even closer to Russia - despite Putin’s crucial assistance to the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan after 9/11. It even meant America was entitled to Russia’s traditional sphere of security and energy supplies, from the Baltics, Ukraine and Georgia to Central Asia and the Caspian.

Such U.S. behavior was bound to produce a Russian backlash. It came under Putin, but it would have been the reaction of any strong Kremlin leader. Those U.S. policies - widely viewed in Moscow as an “encirclement” designed to keep Russia weak and to control its resources - have helped revive an assertive Russian nationalism, destroy the once strong pro-American lobby, and inspire widespread charges that concessions to Washington are “appeasement,” even “capitulationism.” The Kremlin may have overreacted, but the cause and effect threatening a new cold war are clear.

He then concludes that “because the first steps in this direction were taken in Washington, so must be initiatives to reverse it”, and suggests policies very similar to the ones advocated by Kissinger: nuclear non-proliferation, end to Nato expansion.

If a Republican foreign policy guru and a left wing historian can be locked in a passionate embrace of a sensible US-Russia policy, is full on East-West BFF-dom imminent?

Mysterious message spotted on their website. Will update with more information.

Edward Lucas, the Economist’s Eastern Europe correspondent, raises a provocative point in his recent article for Standpoint Magazine.

It is certainly true that the worst aspects of the Russian system are often a concentrated form of our own worst shortcomings. Indeed, the West has largely lost the moral authority that it enjoyed during the last Cold War. Once it was the Russian elite who feared us, and ordinary Russians who admired us. Now the elite despises us for our corruption and weakness, and ordinary Russians see little difference between one lot of rulers and another.

So, after making such a nuanced, astute observation, what does Lucas go on to conclude? That Russia’s experience reveals some inherent, underlying flaw within modern society? That the West must seriously re-examine its own moral-philosophical underpinnings?

Nah!

How about: “just because we have many flaws does not mean that we are always wrong, or that somewhere else can’t be worse”.

That’s right! We might be greedy, corrupt and decadent, but there’s no case for moral equivalence with Russia, because they’re worse!!

Lucas brings up two cases in which the West has been charged with hypocrisy. Critics assert a double standard in the West’s push to for Kosovan statehood and its refusal to recognize the pro-Russian break-away regions of Transdniester and Abkhazia. Lucas recognises that this is one factor leading to the erosion of the West’s moral authority. So does he suggest a more consistent approach? A new politics of neutrality that could eventually transcend the east-west divide?

Erm, not quite:

“(the EU) is incomparably better than the thuggishness and mischief-making that are the hallmark of Kremlin policy in its former empire. We do not want Transdniester to become independent, because it will be like Russia. We do want Kosovo to be independent, because it will eventually be like us. Again, that is a blunt message, but one better spoken proudly than left unsaid.

Bottom line: We may be greedy, imperialistic, corrupt and undemocratic, but by jingo, our greed, imperialism, corruption and authoritarianism are still morally superior to Russia’s! Just because!!

Of course, there is a more reflective and reasonable, if alarming, lesson to be drawn from all this.

In his groundbreaking work Modernity and the Holocaust, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman concluded that, far from being an irrational aberration, an “interruption in the normal flow of history”, or a “momentary madness among sanity”, the holocaust may in fact have been an inevitable outcome of an advanced, technological society in which politics had become decoupled from social controls.

“The Holocaust was born and executed in our modern rational society, at the high stage of our civilization and at the peak of human cultural achievement, and for this reason it is a problem of that society, civilization and culture”, he writes.

Likewise, the traits that Lucas and others criticise in modern Russia are not some kind of gross aberrations from Western norms: instead, they lay bare the problems and contradictions of Western society, civilization and culture.

Over the last 17 years, Russian society has undergone a condensed and accelerated version of the West’s slower, less extreme but equally steady drift towards greater intrusion of the market into politics and society, concentration of power and a weakening of civil society and democratic participation in politics.

Thus, far from providing smug confirmations of Western superiority, the excesses that Lucas sees and justly condemns in today’s Russia might just be warnings from our own future.

Yet I’d just lost my voice after two hours spent in a delirious jingoistic orgy as Russia devastated the Dutch. Watching Russia’s mesmerising play unlocked something primal in me, something dark, smouldering, bloodlustily beautiful.

60 minutes in: caught myself trying to superglue a small Russia flag to my neighbour’s front door.

10 minutes into overtime: searching Aeroflot’s website, rearing to go liberate my brother Slavs in Kosovo and Estonia.

But enough about me: what does this success say about Russia? Two important parallels stand out:

1: The last time Russia triumphed under the closest thing to a Dutch coach was when Peter the Great applied what he learned in Holland to drag his country into modernity. He studied ship building in Amsterdam, kept a Dutch mistress and in addition to technological advances tried to introduce to Russia a protestant spirit of hard work and self reliance. Yet in many ways, Peter’s reign was a culturally repressive one. Peter’s contempt for indigenous Russian traditions and institutions meant that it was only during Pushkin that the Russian language and culture had begun to shed their aura of inferiority.

2: The last time Russia faced the Dutch in a European championship was 1988, at the heyday of Gorbachev’s Perestroika, which remade the country’s social and intellectual fabric. Incidentally, the inspirations for Gorbachev’s reforms were also Western European. Perestroika and ‘new thinking’ were heavily influenced by Italian Eurocommunism and Gramscism. Unlike Peter’s reforms, however, Perestroika ended up being a dismal failure in economic, military and technological terms. Yet it produced an immense cultural and creative awakening.

So was the match a metaphor for a national renaissance, and if so, which kind?

From a purely sporting standpoint, the renaissance of Russia’s team transcends these historical parallels. Hiddink did not remake the squad in the Western European image; in fact, he achieved what had eluded both Gorbachev and Peter the Great – using Western know how to activate and enhance inherent Russian strengths. In his brilliant piece in the Guardian, football historian Jonathan Wilson writes that “Russia’s thrilling commitment to fluidity represents a return to the fundamentals of their own footballing heritage”: after years in the wilderness, Arshavin and co have revived the authentic ‘total football’of the young Soviet side of the 1940s.

Russia is clearly experiencing a re-birth. Its massive sporting successes (whether in women’s tennis, the Olympics or hockey) after over a decade smarting from the horrors of transition only complement its economic and geopolitical re-assertion. Russia is in the news.

Putin’s rule, like Peter’s, aggressively sought Western engagement and know-how, and embraced with zeal its business (if not political) institutions. These instruments, however, were not used to ‘undo’ or ‘over-ride’ Russian culture as in Peter’s day. In fact, the Putin era was marked by a strained synthesis of economic and commercial Westernisation coupled with a peculiar, artificially inseminated nativism.

The state sanctioned fetishisation of the Soviet Union in popular culture, the Putin-inspired brand of laddism and machismo, the return of the traditional family, the constriction of press freedom, the growing ethnic prejudice and nationalism have been the repressive corollaries of this technical modernisation. Yet in one sense, the net effect is the same as in Peter’s day: a growing austerity and social intolerance. The current renaissance is neither deniable nor progressive.

In Euro 1988, the USSR lost to Holland. Like its squad, the Soviet Union itself had run out of steam. Yet the defeat coincided with the flowering of Moscow News, Ogonyok magazine and other independent media, and the general culmination of glasnost, or openness.

The booming, assertive and proud country that won against the Dutch yesterday could not be more different from its beleaguered, teetering predecessor of 20 years ago. Not least because that win came on the heels of the closure of yet another newspaper.