“Bailiffs and riot police had been ordered to evict scores of people and tear down their homes, all apparently unannounced”, reports Al Jazeera, describing a scene familiar to anyone who has followed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The bulldozers continued their work,”, continues the BBC, “tearing through the walls and windows of homes, turning them into piles of rubble within a matter of hours. On one mound of shattered concrete, glass and crumpled metal, lay children’s toys and a black, leather shoe”.

Yet this is not the Gaza strip,  but central Moscow, during last week’s federally mandated demolition of scores of private homes in the suburb of Rechnik, many of which had stood there for over three decades.

Authorities insist that the houses had been built illegally on land given by a Soviet state owned enterprise to its workers for the purpose of allotments and greenhouses, not home construction.

But residents, many of whom have lived unmolessed on the land since the 70s, maintain that the real reason for the evictions is that “the land on which the village stands is prime real estate worth billions of roubles (hundreds of millions of dollars or pounds)”.

According to a report, “Moscow’s Mayor Yuri Luzkhov, a man criticized for the destruction of swathes of the capitals historic centre, insists the demolition is not a case of selective justice”.

His record certainly suggests otherwise.  According to a 2004 Moscow Times article posted by the Moscow Architecture Preservation Society:

Since Luzhkov became mayor in 1992, preservation experts estimate that more than 400 historical buildings from the 17th century onwards have been destroyed, including 60 pamyatniki, or listed buildings, which by law should be untouchable.

“Just as Stalin and Brezhnev destroyed Moscow in their day, Luzhkov is doing the same now,” architect Gennady Kholmansky said. “If he could, he’d put underground parking under St. Basil’s Cathedral.”

“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.

Recently, I was shocked to hear an American friend name one of the virtues of her new house: “there are many police in the neighbourhood”.

You would never hear such a thing come from the mouth of a Russian person, and for good reason.

Calling the cops in Russia risks inviting the sort of treatment Alex got from his former droogs-turned-police officers in the closing part of A Clockwork Orange, because Russia’s militsya continues to prefer upholding its reputation for corruption and extreme violence over upholding the law.

In fact, over last few months alone, Russian police officers were involved in torturing and killing a journalist in custody, a shooting spree, and several revenge murders. Beatings, often against women and vulnerable people, routinely go unpunished and even unmentioned.

Friday’s sentencing of Alexei Dymovsky, the police major from Novorossiisk whose crime was blowing the whistle on law enforcement corruption in a youtube video, was only the latest episode. But at least he got away with his life, unlike others who have exposed police crimes in the past, and as recently as November.

Not surprising, when “30 percent of the country’s police officers are either alcoholics or psychopaths who get their jobs through corrupt connections”, according to veteran Russian criminal psychiatrist Mikhail Vinogradov.

In fact, the state of Russia’s police force has become so dire that one “Interior Ministry official [told] the BBC in August that the situation was “really awful”. “Police officers are not paid properly, so we are only able to recruit the lowest calibre people,” said the unnamed official. “Some of them don’t know the most basic of laws; some even consort with criminal gangs.”

The interior minister has even advised citizens to fight back against the police.

With ordinary Russians taking to the streets, Medvedev has pledged major reforms and restructurings of the police force, raising salaries and decreasing numbers.

If he is serious (didn’t he already promise to clean up police brutality last year?), Medvedev will have an extraordinarily difficult task on his hands: cleaning up a force that has languished in a culture of lawlessness since the early 1990s will take much more than a simple question of a small increase in wages. The problem isnt with a few ‘bad apples’ but rather with the structure of the force itself.

One major systemic problem was raised by Dymovsky in his video: the pressure to fulfill arrest quotas.

According to a major scholarly study of Russian police corruption,

A survey of cadets and recent graduates of a Russian police academy identified “pressure from above to achieve good clear-up rates” as the second most important motive (following “low pay”) for police to use their position for their own ends (Beck & Lee 2002).

But official performance targets also greatly increase the incentives for police to use beatings and torture to compel detainees to “confess” to crimes. A report by Human Rights Watch (1999) cites this pressure from above as an important factor behind the many instances of violent abuses it documents and also provides evidence of gratuitous beatings of indigents and drunks held in “tanks” by the police (see also Moscow-Helsinki Group 2005).

Another investigation has found that, due to the pressures and culture of Russia’s fast-track recruiting procedures, “police recruits think that corruption is often justifiable and/or morally acceptable underparticular circumstances, or for particular goals”.

Unfortunately, prospects for serious reform are dimmed by Medvedev’s decision to retain Nurgaliev, the current interior minister, who “has failed to make any significant inroads into the corruption, unprofessionalism, and demoralization that so deeply undermine the police”.

An epic sci-fi tale set in the 22nd century on fictional planet Pandora and its alien Navi civilisation wins the hearts of  millions of fans.  Then, 40 years later, James Cameron makes Avatar.

That’s right, this week Russian newspapers were rife with allegations that Cameron stole the idea for his blockbuster film from a series of popular Soviet science fiction books by the Strugatsky brothers in the mid 1960s.

According to the Guardian,

It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora – the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.

…There are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids – the Na’vi in Cameron’s epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys’ novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.

So is Boris Strugatsky seeking to take Cameron to the cleaners for a well-earned piece of the second highest grossing movie since Titanic?

After all, that’s exactly what JK Rowling did when she launched huge copyright lawsuits against the Russian Tanya Grotter and Belarussian Porry Gatter books.

Yet unlike the billionaire Rowling jealously chasing down each insignificant Harry Potter upstart, humble pensioner Strugatsky simply “shrugged off suggestions of similarities between Avatar and his Noon Universe, and denied reports circulated last week that he was accusing Cameron of plagiarism”.

Could there be a wider cultural difference at work?

Russia is a frequent target of American copyright suits, but Russians themselves seem to be much less protective with their own intellectual property.

For example, two of the country’s leading and best selling literary  novelists - Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin - have made most of their books available free of charge on their websites.

In fact, Pelevin put his entire oeuvre on the internet for free in 2006, (including english translations and audio books) specifically in protest at the notion of  copyright in the arts.

Vladimir Putin himself had allegedly plagiarised his entire university thesis.

And let’s  not forget the most famous case: General Kalashnikov, whose iconic gun has become the world’s most prolific weapon but who received not a penny in royalties.

So what can explain this attitude?

Perhaps it comes from Russia’s experience with culture in the 20th century.  The official Soviet position denied artists ownership over their outputs, just as people had no ownership of land or other commercial properties.

But ironically, the opposition to Soviet officialdom was even less proprietorial.

Predating the way information is handled in the internet, dissidents shared underground-published works and liberally copied and re-typed books written by other dissidents or smuggled in from the west.

Similarly, when rock bands proliferated in the 70s and 80s, they spread and shared their music secretly using reel-to-reel recorders in what became called ‘magnitizdat’. Either way, culture-whether official or underground-had never carried a commercial character.

Somewhere, James Cameron must be thanking God for the USSR.

Radio Liberty, apparently.

Yesterday, the first of their three part series exploring the middle class across the former Soviet bloc was dedicated specifically to ‘what it means to be middle class’.

Yet without ever defining the slippery concept of middle class itself, Charles Recknagel concludes that, unlike their supposedly heroically liberal and democratic Western counterparts, Russia’s middle classes “don’t endorse the values of democracy and liberalism. They support the social, political, and economic order that has been formed over the past decade in Russia”.

Because the middle class in America and Europe surely don’t “support the social, political, and economic order” there?

(Actually, one subset of the US middle class certainly didnt - the tea party protesters. But somehow I doubt that is who Recknagel is holding up for emulation).

The article berates the fact that “in Russia the stage today is dominated by politically loyal entrepreneurs” and that “there is a widening gap between the wealthy ruling elite and the poor majority”.

Yet this is just as true of America, where I am yet to see a dissident entrepreneur and where “income inequality… is at an all-time high, surpassing even levels seen during the Great Depression, according to a recently updated paper by University of California, Berkeley Professor Emmanuel Saez”.

What did Recknagel hope to find, anyway?

Expecting to stumble across the depositories of Russia’s revolutionary or emancipatory energies amidst the ranks of boring, risk averse, status-obsessed, insecure, conformist, careeristic straight-laced businessmen and upwardly mobile professionals would be like trying to catch a glimpse of Solzhenitsin at a Politbureau meeting.

If he was looking for rebels, Recknagel should have done the obvious and looked in the same places you’d expect to find them in America or Europe - the underground arts scene.

The sort of people who listened to punk legend Viktor Tsoi at unofficial concerts in the Soviet Union, attended Caryl Churchill plays in 80s London or saw Dario Fo perform in Italy.

Thankfully, another Radio Liberty report did just that.

Byron Asher chronicles the “small but significant coterie of gritty, alternative theaters that eschew the mainstream Russian classics — Anton Chekhov and the like — and are dedicated to producing only new, socially relevant plays by young playwrights… tackling social and sometimes political issues that nobody else will”.

“The main goal is to revive a type of theater than can change people, that can transform them in the space of an hour and a half,” says one such new playwright, Maxim Kurochkin, author of Vodka, Fucking and Television. “We haven’t had a chance to see such theater lately. I’m interested in theater that is dangerous for society, that is destructive and brings transformation.”

Who cares about Recknagel’s beloved middle classes?

As Tsoi sang:

We hear: ‘They won’t take risks
Because they’ve got it all
They’ve got a home, with an electric light’
And I don’t know which of us is right.
Rain awaits me out in the street; dinner awaits them at home
Shut the door behind me; I’m leaving
But if you get sick of your cosseting light,
You’ll find a place here among us
Where there’s enough rain for everyone.

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.

This week was the Russian Orthodox Christmas. Twenty years after Communism and somewhat at odds with the newfound Christian ardour of Russia’s elites, it’s not a big stand alone holiday, falling relatively quietly in the middle of the 10 day vacation starting with the big Soviet milestone of New Year’s.

Yet at the same time, Russians are also not celebrating the centeniary of Leo Tolstoy’s death partly because, according to Luke Harding in the Guardian, “the writer’s criticisms of Orthodox religion and authority make him a dangerous figure for those in power – both in Tsarist Russia and also today”.

The question of what to celebrate and why exposes a crucial open sore: After a decade of Yeltsin and a decade of Putin, Russia is still struggling to find an identity.

This unresolved issue has seriously harmed the country’s international standing.

“Today, Russia’s brand is quite negative”, recently wrote an American and Russian academic in the Moscow Times. Their survey of Berkley students’ responses to what the word ‘Russia’ connotes was striking: “Their associations for Russia were overwhelmingly negative; communism (28 percent), cold (13 percent), vodka (7 percent) and corruption (7 percent) dominated the responses and placed Russia far behind the other four countries included in the survey (the United States, China, Italy and Britain)”.

The professors advice Russia to get a brand makeover, and suggest the following new (and rather implausible) buzzwords: Multicultural Russia, Eco Russia and Resilient Russia.

However, any such brand makeovers are meaningless without a fundamental settlement of the identity question.

In today’s New York Times, Alison Smalere counts what Russia means for some of its younger generation:

“This New Year, I spent a couple of evenings in the company of Natasha, mid-20s, just back from four years of study in London. Why return? “Because,” she said, “I wanted to be able to dance on tables.” Britain, she opined, was just too smooth and boring”.

But apart from this vague sense of difference, today’s Russia can boast only a rather directionless modernisation: “Walking down Kutuzovsky Prospekt in west-central Moscow, I see the Escada shop and the sushi restaurant of the present”.

Certainly, some academics, like SV Kortunov, think that Russia “can achieve more than merely modernization, a national state, and a materialistic civilization: it can be a country that combines the latest Western ideas (meritocracy, post- industrialism, etc.) with the traditions of Russian development, including Soviet traditions, and the achievements of Russian philosophical thought”.

But as of now, even 20 years after the end of the USSR, the talk remains “of victory, and starting over — what the popular journalist and author Yulia Latynina calls “news in the future tense.”

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.)

Like James Dean, Yegor Gaidar lived hard and died young.

But unlike Dean, the only victim of whose reckless driving was himself, the man who privatised Russia’s economy in the 1990s took his entire young country on a deadly joyride that wrecked millions of lives.

That’s no hyperbole: The Lancet has determined that the Gaidar-engineered mass-privatisation led to a 13% increase in the death rate, leading over 3 million people to die prematurely.

As if that wasnt enough, even Luke Harding points out that “in January 1992 [Gaidar] abolished state control of prices, wiping out the rouble savings of millions of ordinary Russians overnight. His reforms were described as shock therapy. They paved the way for the dubious state privatisations of the 1990s and the rise of the oligarchs”.

Predictably, the Voice of America’s headline for the obituary reads: Gaidar died believing in the inevitabiliy of Russian democracy”.

A man like Gaidar could only have emerged from the muck of Hobbesan early 90s Russia, a rancid petrie dish incubating malignant strains of bandits and opportunists.

But in fairness, he was not a bandit like Alfred Koch, or a bandit-opportunist like his stablemate Anatoly Chubais.  A minister in his early thirties, he was a romantic, Randian megalomaniac; carried away, like many smart young people, not by malice but by a conviction in his own infallibility and that of his free market shibboleths.  Chillngly, the young Gaidar was a lot like Larry Summers.

Like his grandfather, the Bolshevik and Soviet children’s writer Arkady Gaidar, Yegor believed that he was ‘on the right side of history’; but whereas Arkady’s writing provided some counterbalance of empathy, Yegor quickly lost any connection he may have ever felt towards those on the receiving end of his theoretical postulates.

Yet today’s Russia remains built in his image, evidenced by the fawning official reaction to his death: Putin called Gaidar’s death a “heavy loss for Russia.”

But Gaidar, ‘who served as acting prime minister for just six months in 1992 before public anger forced Yeltsin to fire him’, continues to be despised by most Russians, so there was no populist gain to be had in singing his praises. And yet today the Kremlin finds itself on the same side as its favoured liberal punching bags Nemtsov et al. Why?

Because the Putin government is the direct descendant of the Gaidar-Yeltsin right-wing economic philosophy. Thus it came as no surprise to read that “after leaving politics, he remained influential behind the scenes, offering informal advice to Vladimir Putin on a range of economic issues”. Or that his daughter had become a cog in Putin’s power vertical.

Because, for all the political animus between Putin’s siloviki and the liberal democrats, they are bound together by their Gaidarist love for capitalism and contempt for the people.

So what to make of the man Mark Ames eulogised a decade ago as “the frog-faced architect of ‘reform’ and ’shock therapy’ and every other curse word associated with capitalism in Russia…the guy responsible for shaking down the entire russian population and handing over their belongings to a few well-placed comrades, [who] will go down in Russian folklore as one of the most terrifyoing villains ever to set foot on Mother Rus - [and whose] name will be invoked by parents to scare children into going to bed and brushing their teeth.”

It’s about time Russians started taking care of their teeth.

“We are not ready to sign under the plans to cut 22-25% as part of a direct continuation of the Kyoto Protocol”, declared Russia’s environmental diplomat Oleg Shamanov.

This despite the fact that Russia remains the only developed country ALREADY operating at below-1990 emissions levels, because of the post-Soviet industrial collapse.

It has thus benefitted handsomely from Kyoto, under which agreement “the fall in production has given the country a vast and potentially valuable supply of tradable carbon offsets”, worth tens of billions of dollars.

But, according to analysts, this credit surplus is also “a major stumbling block to reaching an agreement in Copenhagen on a new treaty. Environmentalists and the European Union wish to limit Russia’s opportunities to “export pollution” by selling off the rights to emit carbon”.

Yet because of these potentially lucrative carbon offsets, as well as some theoretical possibilities for new shipping and trading routes opening up as a result of glacial melt, “there is a widespread opinion among the Russian ruling elites that global warming could be beneficial to Russia”.

Such a blase attitude to climate change is dangerous for the world, but no less dangerous for Russia itself, which is poised for some uniquely catastrophic outcomes of global warming.

Just one case of foreshadowing is the struggle of Yakutsk natives as the ground literally melts beneath their feet, compellingly illuminated in today’s Guardian.

And every extra hour that the Russian government dithers about emissions benchmarks and salivates at the prospects of carbon trading windfalls, entire Siberian towns will continue to sink inexorably into the rapidly melting permafrost.

Engaging climate change can carry positive externalities for society as a whole. For example, Aysha Ghadiali at Resources for the Future shows that green policies are optimised when implemented in ways that mobilise and empower women. Because “women were more likely than men to support government policies to reduce emissions, such as carbon taxes, [and] to buy sustainable products with a Fair Trade seal”, good green policy is also good social policy.

But how to persuade the new Siberian sunbathers enjoying some global-warming-caused respite from the savage winters that it is a good thing to return to living in the coldest place on earth?