December 7, 2007 — Contents

FRIDAY DECEMBER 7 CONTENTS

(1) Annals of Putin’s Electoral Atrocities

(2) Putin puts Russia’s Internet in his Crosshairs

(3) Latynina on Nemtsov

(4) A Requiem for Russia

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Putin’s Elections Atrocities

The Moscow Times reports:

A video showing purported ballot stuffing during the State Duma elections is making its way through the Internet and prompting allegations of electoral fraud from opposition activists.

Election officials and independent monitors, however, said that nothing illegal was revealed in the minute-long video, which shows a bespectacled woman cheerfully sliding ballot after ballot into an electronic ballot box. A caption says it was filmed Sunday at Polling Station No. 730, located in the Otradnoye district in northern Moscow. The opposition movement Smena posted the video on its site under the headline “Election Falsification.” But Central Elections Commission member Yevgeny Kolyushin said Tuesday that the woman could have merely been inserting into the machine ballots filled in by voters unable to come to the polling station. “People at home cast their ballots into a portable box, then at the local election commission it’s opened and the ballots are entered into the electronic ballot box,” Kolyushin said.

Galina Zavodova, director of School No. 240, where the polling station was located, said she witnessed the scene captured on video and saw a young woman filming it. The ballots were from people who had voted at home, Zavodova said by telephone. The ballots were entered into the machine sometime after 8 p.m., she said. Grigory Melkonyants, deputy head of Golos, an election monitoring group that has criticized Sunday’s election as unfair, said election laws stipulated that ballots dropped into portable ballot boxes should subsequently be entered into regular ballot boxes. Viktoria Galanina, spokeswoman for Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov, said this was standard protocol. After seeing the video for himself, a tired-looking Churov implied in a live interview with Ren-TV early Monday morning that the video was a fake. As evidence, Churov noted that a security guard who enters the frame midway through the video is wearing an Emergency Situations Ministry uniform. Officers from that ministry should not be guarding polling stations, Churov said.

A Nov. 29 statement posted on the ministry’s web site, however, said more than 50,000 firemen and rescue workers would be on duty at polling stations across the country during the election. Galanina confirmed on Tuesday that Emergency Situations Ministry officers could indeed be on duty at polling stations. Golos, the country’s only independent election-monitoring body, criticized on Tuesday the State Duma vote as riddled with serious violations that robbed the election process of all legitimacy. “The lack of political competition, the pressure on the voting process, the mass casting of absentee ballots and the unprecedented use of administrative resources … in favor of one party” created serious doubts about whether the vote conformed to accepted international standards, Golos said in a statement. The statement was issued just after the Central Elections Commission tried to deflect Monday’s criticism by European observers that the elections were fundamentally unfair, labeling the assessment “subjective.” The Golos statement was based on visits Sunday to more than 20,000 polling stations in 38 regions by 2,500 volunteers, the organization said. Golos also set up a hotline for voters to report violations.

According to Golos’ data, 23 percent of the 4,000 calls it received related to restrictions placed on observers at polling stations. About 22 percent called to complain of illegal campaigning; 15 percent cited voter list violations; 9 percent said voter privacy was not observed; and 4 percent complained of some form of payment for votes. “We consider the vote to be illegal. Therefore, several new State Duma deputies will be working illegally,” said Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, which is funded by several Western governments. “Unfortunately, because we do not have documented proof of all of these violations, we cannot go so far as to call the new State Duma illegitimate,” Shibanova said. “But the voting process certainly was not legitimate.”

The main opposition parties were joined by the European Union, the United States and Britain, among others, in criticizing Sunday’s elections after hearing a damning declaration issued Monday by the observers from the parliamentary assemblies from the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Central Elections Commission dismissed the declaration Monday, and on Tuesday, its head, Vladimir Churov, mocked it. Churov, who holds a degree in physics, took a swipe at claims that the political atmosphere was dominated by the Kremlin during the vote. “I can say that, for example, the election took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other large cities in an atmosphere of serious pollution by automobile exhaust,” he said at a news conference, Interfax reported. “But, as an atmospheric physicist, I wouldn’t even try to say in what kind of political atmosphere they took place.”

The Foreign Ministry received the joint declaration coolly, issuing a statement late Monday saying it contained “a collection of slogans not backed up with any hard facts” that “give rise to serious doubts.” Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of the liberal Yabloko party, which scored its worst-ever result at 1.6 percent, sent a message to its voters that the “manipulations and violations through cynical lies” in the vote were “unprecedented.” Churov confirmed on Tuesday that United Russia would have 315 seats in the next Duma. The party had 297 seats at the end of the outgoing 450-seat Duma. The Communist Party will have 57 seats, while the remaining seats will be divided between two parties sympathetic to the Kremlin, the Liberal Democratic Party, with 40 seats, and A Just Russia, with 38 seats, Churov said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Putin’s Elections Atrocities

The Moscow Times reports:

A video showing purported ballot stuffing during the State Duma elections is making its way through the Internet and prompting allegations of electoral fraud from opposition activists.

Election officials and independent monitors, however, said that nothing illegal was revealed in the minute-long video, which shows a bespectacled woman cheerfully sliding ballot after ballot into an electronic ballot box. A caption says it was filmed Sunday at Polling Station No. 730, located in the Otradnoye district in northern Moscow. The opposition movement Smena posted the video on its site under the headline “Election Falsification.” But Central Elections Commission member Yevgeny Kolyushin said Tuesday that the woman could have merely been inserting into the machine ballots filled in by voters unable to come to the polling station. “People at home cast their ballots into a portable box, then at the local election commission it’s opened and the ballots are entered into the electronic ballot box,” Kolyushin said.

Galina Zavodova, director of School No. 240, where the polling station was located, said she witnessed the scene captured on video and saw a young woman filming it. The ballots were from people who had voted at home, Zavodova said by telephone. The ballots were entered into the machine sometime after 8 p.m., she said. Grigory Melkonyants, deputy head of Golos, an election monitoring group that has criticized Sunday’s election as unfair, said election laws stipulated that ballots dropped into portable ballot boxes should subsequently be entered into regular ballot boxes. Viktoria Galanina, spokeswoman for Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov, said this was standard protocol. After seeing the video for himself, a tired-looking Churov implied in a live interview with Ren-TV early Monday morning that the video was a fake. As evidence, Churov noted that a security guard who enters the frame midway through the video is wearing an Emergency Situations Ministry uniform. Officers from that ministry should not be guarding polling stations, Churov said.

A Nov. 29 statement posted on the ministry’s web site, however, said more than 50,000 firemen and rescue workers would be on duty at polling stations across the country during the election. Galanina confirmed on Tuesday that Emergency Situations Ministry officers could indeed be on duty at polling stations. Golos, the country’s only independent election-monitoring body, criticized on Tuesday the State Duma vote as riddled with serious violations that robbed the election process of all legitimacy. “The lack of political competition, the pressure on the voting process, the mass casting of absentee ballots and the unprecedented use of administrative resources … in favor of one party” created serious doubts about whether the vote conformed to accepted international standards, Golos said in a statement. The statement was issued just after the Central Elections Commission tried to deflect Monday’s criticism by European observers that the elections were fundamentally unfair, labeling the assessment “subjective.” The Golos statement was based on visits Sunday to more than 20,000 polling stations in 38 regions by 2,500 volunteers, the organization said. Golos also set up a hotline for voters to report violations.

According to Golos’ data, 23 percent of the 4,000 calls it received related to restrictions placed on observers at polling stations. About 22 percent called to complain of illegal campaigning; 15 percent cited voter list violations; 9 percent said voter privacy was not observed; and 4 percent complained of some form of payment for votes. “We consider the vote to be illegal. Therefore, several new State Duma deputies will be working illegally,” said Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, which is funded by several Western governments. “Unfortunately, because we do not have documented proof of all of these violations, we cannot go so far as to call the new State Duma illegitimate,” Shibanova said. “But the voting process certainly was not legitimate.”

The main opposition parties were joined by the European Union, the United States and Britain, among others, in criticizing Sunday’s elections after hearing a damning declaration issued Monday by the observers from the parliamentary assemblies from the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Central Elections Commission dismissed the declaration Monday, and on Tuesday, its head, Vladimir Churov, mocked it. Churov, who holds a degree in physics, took a swipe at claims that the political atmosphere was dominated by the Kremlin during the vote. “I can say that, for example, the election took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other large cities in an atmosphere of serious pollution by automobile exhaust,” he said at a news conference, Interfax reported. “But, as an atmospheric physicist, I wouldn’t even try to say in what kind of political atmosphere they took place.”

The Foreign Ministry received the joint declaration coolly, issuing a statement late Monday saying it contained “a collection of slogans not backed up with any hard facts” that “give rise to serious doubts.” Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of the liberal Yabloko party, which scored its worst-ever result at 1.6 percent, sent a message to its voters that the “manipulations and violations through cynical lies” in the vote were “unprecedented.” Churov confirmed on Tuesday that United Russia would have 315 seats in the next Duma. The party had 297 seats at the end of the outgoing 450-seat Duma. The Communist Party will have 57 seats, while the remaining seats will be divided between two parties sympathetic to the Kremlin, the Liberal Democratic Party, with 40 seats, and A Just Russia, with 38 seats, Churov said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Putin’s Elections Atrocities

The Moscow Times reports:

A video showing purported ballot stuffing during the State Duma elections is making its way through the Internet and prompting allegations of electoral fraud from opposition activists.

Election officials and independent monitors, however, said that nothing illegal was revealed in the minute-long video, which shows a bespectacled woman cheerfully sliding ballot after ballot into an electronic ballot box. A caption says it was filmed Sunday at Polling Station No. 730, located in the Otradnoye district in northern Moscow. The opposition movement Smena posted the video on its site under the headline “Election Falsification.” But Central Elections Commission member Yevgeny Kolyushin said Tuesday that the woman could have merely been inserting into the machine ballots filled in by voters unable to come to the polling station. “People at home cast their ballots into a portable box, then at the local election commission it’s opened and the ballots are entered into the electronic ballot box,” Kolyushin said.

Galina Zavodova, director of School No. 240, where the polling station was located, said she witnessed the scene captured on video and saw a young woman filming it. The ballots were from people who had voted at home, Zavodova said by telephone. The ballots were entered into the machine sometime after 8 p.m., she said. Grigory Melkonyants, deputy head of Golos, an election monitoring group that has criticized Sunday’s election as unfair, said election laws stipulated that ballots dropped into portable ballot boxes should subsequently be entered into regular ballot boxes. Viktoria Galanina, spokeswoman for Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov, said this was standard protocol. After seeing the video for himself, a tired-looking Churov implied in a live interview with Ren-TV early Monday morning that the video was a fake. As evidence, Churov noted that a security guard who enters the frame midway through the video is wearing an Emergency Situations Ministry uniform. Officers from that ministry should not be guarding polling stations, Churov said.

A Nov. 29 statement posted on the ministry’s web site, however, said more than 50,000 firemen and rescue workers would be on duty at polling stations across the country during the election. Galanina confirmed on Tuesday that Emergency Situations Ministry officers could indeed be on duty at polling stations. Golos, the country’s only independent election-monitoring body, criticized on Tuesday the State Duma vote as riddled with serious violations that robbed the election process of all legitimacy. “The lack of political competition, the pressure on the voting process, the mass casting of absentee ballots and the unprecedented use of administrative resources … in favor of one party” created serious doubts about whether the vote conformed to accepted international standards, Golos said in a statement. The statement was issued just after the Central Elections Commission tried to deflect Monday’s criticism by European observers that the elections were fundamentally unfair, labeling the assessment “subjective.” The Golos statement was based on visits Sunday to more than 20,000 polling stations in 38 regions by 2,500 volunteers, the organization said. Golos also set up a hotline for voters to report violations.

According to Golos’ data, 23 percent of the 4,000 calls it received related to restrictions placed on observers at polling stations. About 22 percent called to complain of illegal campaigning; 15 percent cited voter list violations; 9 percent said voter privacy was not observed; and 4 percent complained of some form of payment for votes. “We consider the vote to be illegal. Therefore, several new State Duma deputies will be working illegally,” said Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, which is funded by several Western governments. “Unfortunately, because we do not have documented proof of all of these violations, we cannot go so far as to call the new State Duma illegitimate,” Shibanova said. “But the voting process certainly was not legitimate.”

The main opposition parties were joined by the European Union, the United States and Britain, among others, in criticizing Sunday’s elections after hearing a damning declaration issued Monday by the observers from the parliamentary assemblies from the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Central Elections Commission dismissed the declaration Monday, and on Tuesday, its head, Vladimir Churov, mocked it. Churov, who holds a degree in physics, took a swipe at claims that the political atmosphere was dominated by the Kremlin during the vote. “I can say that, for example, the election took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other large cities in an atmosphere of serious pollution by automobile exhaust,” he said at a news conference, Interfax reported. “But, as an atmospheric physicist, I wouldn’t even try to say in what kind of political atmosphere they took place.”

The Foreign Ministry received the joint declaration coolly, issuing a statement late Monday saying it contained “a collection of slogans not backed up with any hard facts” that “give rise to serious doubts.” Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of the liberal Yabloko party, which scored its worst-ever result at 1.6 percent, sent a message to its voters that the “manipulations and violations through cynical lies” in the vote were “unprecedented.” Churov confirmed on Tuesday that United Russia would have 315 seats in the next Duma. The party had 297 seats at the end of the outgoing 450-seat Duma. The Communist Party will have 57 seats, while the remaining seats will be divided between two parties sympathetic to the Kremlin, the Liberal Democratic Party, with 40 seats, and A Just Russia, with 38 seats, Churov said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Putin’s Elections Atrocities

The Moscow Times reports:

A video showing purported ballot stuffing during the State Duma elections is making its way through the Internet and prompting allegations of electoral fraud from opposition activists.

Election officials and independent monitors, however, said that nothing illegal was revealed in the minute-long video, which shows a bespectacled woman cheerfully sliding ballot after ballot into an electronic ballot box. A caption says it was filmed Sunday at Polling Station No. 730, located in the Otradnoye district in northern Moscow. The opposition movement Smena posted the video on its site under the headline “Election Falsification.” But Central Elections Commission member Yevgeny Kolyushin said Tuesday that the woman could have merely been inserting into the machine ballots filled in by voters unable to come to the polling station. “People at home cast their ballots into a portable box, then at the local election commission it’s opened and the ballots are entered into the electronic ballot box,” Kolyushin said.

Galina Zavodova, director of School No. 240, where the polling station was located, said she witnessed the scene captured on video and saw a young woman filming it. The ballots were from people who had voted at home, Zavodova said by telephone. The ballots were entered into the machine sometime after 8 p.m., she said. Grigory Melkonyants, deputy head of Golos, an election monitoring group that has criticized Sunday’s election as unfair, said election laws stipulated that ballots dropped into portable ballot boxes should subsequently be entered into regular ballot boxes. Viktoria Galanina, spokeswoman for Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov, said this was standard protocol. After seeing the video for himself, a tired-looking Churov implied in a live interview with Ren-TV early Monday morning that the video was a fake. As evidence, Churov noted that a security guard who enters the frame midway through the video is wearing an Emergency Situations Ministry uniform. Officers from that ministry should not be guarding polling stations, Churov said.

A Nov. 29 statement posted on the ministry’s web site, however, said more than 50,000 firemen and rescue workers would be on duty at polling stations across the country during the election. Galanina confirmed on Tuesday that Emergency Situations Ministry officers could indeed be on duty at polling stations. Golos, the country’s only independent election-monitoring body, criticized on Tuesday the State Duma vote as riddled with serious violations that robbed the election process of all legitimacy. “The lack of political competition, the pressure on the voting process, the mass casting of absentee ballots and the unprecedented use of administrative resources … in favor of one party” created serious doubts about whether the vote conformed to accepted international standards, Golos said in a statement. The statement was issued just after the Central Elections Commission tried to deflect Monday’s criticism by European observers that the elections were fundamentally unfair, labeling the assessment “subjective.” The Golos statement was based on visits Sunday to more than 20,000 polling stations in 38 regions by 2,500 volunteers, the organization said. Golos also set up a hotline for voters to report violations.

According to Golos’ data, 23 percent of the 4,000 calls it received related to restrictions placed on observers at polling stations. About 22 percent called to complain of illegal campaigning; 15 percent cited voter list violations; 9 percent said voter privacy was not observed; and 4 percent complained of some form of payment for votes. “We consider the vote to be illegal. Therefore, several new State Duma deputies will be working illegally,” said Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, which is funded by several Western governments. “Unfortunately, because we do not have documented proof of all of these violations, we cannot go so far as to call the new State Duma illegitimate,” Shibanova said. “But the voting process certainly was not legitimate.”

The main opposition parties were joined by the European Union, the United States and Britain, among others, in criticizing Sunday’s elections after hearing a damning declaration issued Monday by the observers from the parliamentary assemblies from the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Central Elections Commission dismissed the declaration Monday, and on Tuesday, its head, Vladimir Churov, mocked it. Churov, who holds a degree in physics, took a swipe at claims that the political atmosphere was dominated by the Kremlin during the vote. “I can say that, for example, the election took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other large cities in an atmosphere of serious pollution by automobile exhaust,” he said at a news conference, Interfax reported. “But, as an atmospheric physicist, I wouldn’t even try to say in what kind of political atmosphere they took place.”

The Foreign Ministry received the joint declaration coolly, issuing a statement late Monday saying it contained “a collection of slogans not backed up with any hard facts” that “give rise to serious doubts.” Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of the liberal Yabloko party, which scored its worst-ever result at 1.6 percent, sent a message to its voters that the “manipulations and violations through cynical lies” in the vote were “unprecedented.” Churov confirmed on Tuesday that United Russia would have 315 seats in the next Duma. The party had 297 seats at the end of the outgoing 450-seat Duma. The Communist Party will have 57 seats, while the remaining seats will be divided between two parties sympathetic to the Kremlin, the Liberal Democratic Party, with 40 seats, and A Just Russia, with 38 seats, Churov said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Annals of Putin’s Elections Atrocities

The Moscow Times reports:

A video showing purported ballot stuffing during the State Duma elections is making its way through the Internet and prompting allegations of electoral fraud from opposition activists.

Election officials and independent monitors, however, said that nothing illegal was revealed in the minute-long video, which shows a bespectacled woman cheerfully sliding ballot after ballot into an electronic ballot box. A caption says it was filmed Sunday at Polling Station No. 730, located in the Otradnoye district in northern Moscow. The opposition movement Smena posted the video on its site under the headline “Election Falsification.” But Central Elections Commission member Yevgeny Kolyushin said Tuesday that the woman could have merely been inserting into the machine ballots filled in by voters unable to come to the polling station. “People at home cast their ballots into a portable box, then at the local election commission it’s opened and the ballots are entered into the electronic ballot box,” Kolyushin said.

Galina Zavodova, director of School No. 240, where the polling station was located, said she witnessed the scene captured on video and saw a young woman filming it. The ballots were from people who had voted at home, Zavodova said by telephone. The ballots were entered into the machine sometime after 8 p.m., she said. Grigory Melkonyants, deputy head of Golos, an election monitoring group that has criticized Sunday’s election as unfair, said election laws stipulated that ballots dropped into portable ballot boxes should subsequently be entered into regular ballot boxes. Viktoria Galanina, spokeswoman for Central Elections Commission head Vladimir Churov, said this was standard protocol. After seeing the video for himself, a tired-looking Churov implied in a live interview with Ren-TV early Monday morning that the video was a fake. As evidence, Churov noted that a security guard who enters the frame midway through the video is wearing an Emergency Situations Ministry uniform. Officers from that ministry should not be guarding polling stations, Churov said.

A Nov. 29 statement posted on the ministry’s web site, however, said more than 50,000 firemen and rescue workers would be on duty at polling stations across the country during the election. Galanina confirmed on Tuesday that Emergency Situations Ministry officers could indeed be on duty at polling stations. Golos, the country’s only independent election-monitoring body, criticized on Tuesday the State Duma vote as riddled with serious violations that robbed the election process of all legitimacy. “The lack of political competition, the pressure on the voting process, the mass casting of absentee ballots and the unprecedented use of administrative resources … in favor of one party” created serious doubts about whether the vote conformed to accepted international standards, Golos said in a statement. The statement was issued just after the Central Elections Commission tried to deflect Monday’s criticism by European observers that the elections were fundamentally unfair, labeling the assessment “subjective.” The Golos statement was based on visits Sunday to more than 20,000 polling stations in 38 regions by 2,500 volunteers, the organization said. Golos also set up a hotline for voters to report violations.

According to Golos’ data, 23 percent of the 4,000 calls it received related to restrictions placed on observers at polling stations. About 22 percent called to complain of illegal campaigning; 15 percent cited voter list violations; 9 percent said voter privacy was not observed; and 4 percent complained of some form of payment for votes. “We consider the vote to be illegal. Therefore, several new State Duma deputies will be working illegally,” said Lilia Shibanova, the head of Golos, which is funded by several Western governments. “Unfortunately, because we do not have documented proof of all of these violations, we cannot go so far as to call the new State Duma illegitimate,” Shibanova said. “But the voting process certainly was not legitimate.”

The main opposition parties were joined by the European Union, the United States and Britain, among others, in criticizing Sunday’s elections after hearing a damning declaration issued Monday by the observers from the parliamentary assemblies from the Council of Europe and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Central Elections Commission dismissed the declaration Monday, and on Tuesday, its head, Vladimir Churov, mocked it. Churov, who holds a degree in physics, took a swipe at claims that the political atmosphere was dominated by the Kremlin during the vote. “I can say that, for example, the election took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg and other large cities in an atmosphere of serious pollution by automobile exhaust,” he said at a news conference, Interfax reported. “But, as an atmospheric physicist, I wouldn’t even try to say in what kind of political atmosphere they took place.”

The Foreign Ministry received the joint declaration coolly, issuing a statement late Monday saying it contained “a collection of slogans not backed up with any hard facts” that “give rise to serious doubts.” Grigory Yavlinsky, the head of the liberal Yabloko party, which scored its worst-ever result at 1.6 percent, sent a message to its voters that the “manipulations and violations through cynical lies” in the vote were “unprecedented.” Churov confirmed on Tuesday that United Russia would have 315 seats in the next Duma. The party had 297 seats at the end of the outgoing 450-seat Duma. The Communist Party will have 57 seats, while the remaining seats will be divided between two parties sympathetic to the Kremlin, the Liberal Democratic Party, with 40 seats, and A Just Russia, with 38 seats, Churov said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin Puts the Internet in his Crosshairs

Media Bistro reports:

It’s no secret that Vladimir Putin has been active in promoting the Russian government’s policies on the internet. But the Kremlin’s attempts to dominate Russian-language sectors of cyberspace have taken it into some surprising places.

Like the extremely popular blog/online diary site LiveJournal. Buried in a Washington Post piece on Kremlin PR efforts on the internet was the fact that Putin-linked oligarch Alexander Mamut bought the rights to operate LiveJournal for all Russian-language users. The license, purchased by Mamut’s company SUP, gives them control over all LiveJournal accounts that print primarily in Cyrillic, are located within the former USSR (including the Ukraine, the Baltic states & Central Asia) or use a Russian web browser.

Mamut, a former power broker during the Boris Yeltsin era, still maintains close ties to the Vladimir Putin Kremlin.

Some LiveJournal users expressed concern over the purchase, such as one who wrote to LJ owners SixApart:

I am concerned that a company based in Russia can potentially get access to private and friends-only records in my blog. I would eschew the discussion on the rationality of such worry (perhaps growing up back in the USSR made me a bit parnoid) – but at this time I simply want to state that I am worried about the change of jurisdiction of the company that handles my seemingly private content. I have to remind you that the legal landscape in Russia is different from that in the US. Being a US Citizen, I personally view such change more as a nuisance rather than an event with dire consequences. However some of my friends who reside in Russia are worried much more than me. Bottom line, as a paying customer of your service, I would like to hear some reassurances of the service quality (and perhaps even availability) under the terms for which I paid the subscription fee.

But the question here is what will happen if relations between the United States and Russia continue to deteriorate — American SixApart customers using the Russian language will find that their online archives are effectively under foreign jurisdiction. After all, the Putin government hasn’t exactly been kind to their media critics.

The fantastic Washington Post article referred to:

After ignoring the Internet for years to focus on controlling traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Kremlin and its allies are turning their attention to cyberspace, which remains a haven for critical reporting and vibrant discussion in Russia’s dwindling public sphere.

Allies of President Vladimir Putin are creating pro-government news and pop culture Web sites while purchasing some established online outlets known for independent journalism. They are nurturing a network of friendly bloggers ready to disseminate propaganda on command. And there is talk of creating a new Russian computer network — one that would be separate from the Internet at large and, potentially, much easier for the authorities to control.

“The attractiveness of the Internet as a free platform for free people is already dimming,” said Iosif Dzyaloshinsky, a mass media expert at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow.

Putin addressed the question of Internet censorship during a national call-in show broadcast live on radio and television this month. “In the Russian Federation, no control is being exercised over the World Wide Web, over the Russian segment of the Internet,” Putin said. “I think that from the point of view of technological solutions, that would not make any sense.

“Naturally, in this sphere, as in other spheres, we should be thinking about adhering to Russian laws, about making sure that child pornography is not distributed, that financial crimes are not committed,” he continued. “But that is a task for the law enforcement agencies. Total control and the work of the law enforcement agencies are two different things.”

Many people here say they believe Putin didn’t mind a free Internet as long as it had weak penetration in Russia. But with 25 percent of Russian adults now online, up from 8 percent in 2002, cyberspace has become an issue of increasing concern for the government.

Some Russian Internet experts say a turning point came in 2004, when blogs and uncensored online publications helped drive a popular uprising in Ukraine after a pro-Moscow candidate was declared the winner of a presidential election. Days of street protests in the capital, Kiev, led to a new vote that brought a pro-Western politician into the presidency.

Today, the Kremlin is ready with online forces of its own when street action begins.

On April 14, an opposition movement held a march in central Moscow that drew hundreds of people; police detained at least 170, including the leader of the march, chess star Garry Kasparov.

Pavel Danilin, a 30-year-old Putin supporter and blogger whose online icon is the fearsome robot of the “Terminator” movie, works for a political consulting company loyal to the Kremlin. He said he and his team, which included people from a youth movement called the Young Guard, quickly started blogging that day about a smaller, pro-Kremlin march held at the same time.

They linked to one another repeatedly and soon, Danilin said, posts about the pro-Kremlin march had crowded out all the items about the opposition march on the Yandex Web portal’s coveted ranking of the top five Russian blog posts.

“We played it beautifully,” Danilin said.

In a lengthy article published online last fall, three Russian rights activists argued that a strident, vulgar and uniform pro-Kremlin ideology had so permeated blogs and chat rooms that it could only be the result of a coordinated campaign.

Putin’s allies in the online world acknowledge that the Internet represents a challenge to the status quo in Russia, which has, since Soviet times, relied on state-controlled television to influence public opinion across the country’s 11 time zones.
“You watch the first channel or the second channel and you can only see good things happening in Russia,” said Andrei Osipov, the 26-year-old editor of the Web site of Nashi, a pro-Kremlin youth group, referring to national stations that back the Kremlin. “The Internet is the freest mass media. . . . There is competition between state and opposition organizations.”

The Kremlin is also increasingly allying itself with privately run online outlets that foster a new ideal for life in today’s Russia, one that is consumerist and uncompromisingly pro-Putin.

The main champion of this ideal is 28-year-old businessman Konstantin Rykov. The pearl of Rykov’s media empire is the two-year-old Vzglyad (“View”) online newspaper, which features a serious-looking news section with stories toeing the Kremlin line and a lifestyle section that covers the latest in luxury cars and interior design. Surveys rank Vzglyad as one of Russia’s five most-visited news sites.

“Rykov is a man who created a good business on the government’s view that it has to invest in ideology,” said Anton Nossik, an Internet pioneer in Russia now in charge of blog development for Sup, an online media company. Nossik said that Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s domestic political adviser, organized private funding for Rykov’s projects.

Kremlin officials deny any involvement. “It is a general habit of everyone to connect every popular occurrence and success with the Kremlin,” deputy Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said when asked about Rykov. “In reality, it is not so.”

In an interview, Rykov would not comment on his investors. A framed portrait of Surkov hung above his desk; Rykov is running for parliament on the list of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party in elections slated for December.
“The Vzglyad newspaper has created this appearance of a state publication for itself since the very beginning,” Rykov said. “And from the perspective of business and selling ads, that’s very good.”

Allies of the Kremlin have also begun buying some of the companies that have helped make the Internet a bastion of free expression in Russia. Gazeta.ru, long the country’s most respected online newspaper, was sold in December to a metals magnate and Putin loyalist.

And last October, Sup, which is owned by Alexander Mamut, a tycoon with ties to the Kremlin, bought the rights to develop the Russian-language segment of U.S.-based LiveJournal. The segment, with half a million users, is Russia’s most popular blog portal.

“Mr. Rykov is pro-Kremlin. Mamut and Sup are pro-Kremlin. The social networks are all being bought by pro-Kremlin people,” Ruslan Paushu, 30, a popular blogger who works for Rykov, said in an interview. “Everything’s okay.”
So far, Gazeta.ru has continued to publish articles critical of the Kremlin, and no widespread censorship has been reported on blogs run by Sup. But as the government wakes up to the Internet’s potential, many of Putin’s critics are growing nervous.

Prosecutors have begun to target postings on blogs or Internet chat sites, charging users with slander or extremism after they criticize Putin or other officials. Most such incidents have occurred outside Moscow, and federal officials deny that they signal any broader campaign to control the Internet.

“Personally, I am against developing and adopting a special law that would regulate the Internet,” Leonid Reiman, minister of information technology and communications, said in a written response to questions. “The Internet has been always developing as a free medium, and it should remain as such.”

But in July, Putin briefed his Security Council on plans to make Russia a global information leader by 2015. Russian news media reported that those plans included a new network apart from the global Internet and open only to former Soviet republics.

“To put it bluntly, we need to fight for the water mains,” Gleb Pavlovsky, the Kremlin’s foremost political consultant, said in an interview. “We need to fight for the central networks and for the audience segments that they reach.”

Wolfgang Kleinwaechter, special adviser to the chairmen of the Internet Governance Forum, a group convened by the United Nations, said some Russian officials he has spoken to are considering a separate Internet, with Cyrillic domain names, and appear to be studying China’s Internet controls.

Peskov, the deputy presidential spokesman, said in an interview that a Russia-only Internet was still in the “investigative phase,” adding, “I don’t know if it’s more than thinking aloud.”

“It’s not meant to get rid of the global network,” he said. “It’s a discussion of creating an addition.”

For now, supporters as well as critics of Putin see the Kremlin doing something atypical: competing on more or less equal terms with its opponents.

“Certainly, there’s the dark segment that is still saying words like ‘prohibit’ and ‘limit,’ ” said Marat Guelman, who worked as a political consultant for the Kremlin until 2004, when he broke with the administration. But “what is happening on the Web vis-a-vis the authorities is very good,” he added. “That is, they’re trying to play the game.”
That strategy is in contrast to the way Putin brought the independent television network NTV to heel at the beginning of his term, using highly publicized court cases and raids by heavily armed security forces.

Marina Litvinovich, a blogger who used to work for Pavlovsky, the Kremlin consultant, and now works for Kasparov’s United Civil Front, said she is satisfied with the government’s approach to the Internet because it forces Putin’s allies to respond to criticism rather than simply ignore it.

She also argued that as the Kremlin consolidates political power, it has less incentive to come up with sophisticated online propaganda. “They’re not really in need of particular creativity right now,” she said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Latynina on Nemtsov

Writing in the Moscow Times, hero journalist Yulia Latynina explains the arrest of Boris Nemtsov prior to the parliamentary elections:

Last week I heard the most optimistic news that an inveterate pessimist like me could have possibly imagined. No, I’m not referring to the recent State Duma elections. That isn’t news. The word “news” implies something unexpected, and there was nothing unexpected about the results of these elections.

It wasn’t the elections that made news, but the arrests of prominent opposition figures prior to the elections: Boris Nemtsov of the liberal Union of Right Forces party, former world chess champion and opposition leader Garry Kasparov and liberal activist and satirist Viktor Shenderovich. But even more surprising than their arrests was what happened while they were in custody.

I called all three of the detainees while they were behind bars. First on my list was Nemtsov, who told me that the police officers at the station asked him for his autograph and for a group photograph. Next I called Shenderovich, who said he was given the same kind of reception. These celebrity convicts were dutifully served hot coffee while in captivity, and one was even given a bottle of whiskey.

One hour before I heard the story about this VIP treatment, I heard a completely different story about Anya, a modest, attractive girl from Ryazan who had moved to Moscow and later found work in a large department store. City police stopped Anya on the street one day and demanded her Moscow registration papers, the infamous propiska. They then took her in for “questioning,” which meant a lot of frisking and crude taunts. Then the police chief stepped in and, with a lewd smile, said to his subordinates, “When you’re finished searching her, let me have her for a while in my office — for further ‘questioning.’”

At this point, Anya was terrified and handed the cops all the money that she had managed to scrape together. Then she was released. Had the officers really been planning to rape her, or was it simply a scare tactic to extort money? It is hard to say.

This is the sad reality in our country.

Returning to Nemtsov, Kasparov and Shenderovich in custody. I understand why a police officer complained to one of the prominent detainees about the rampant abuses of power in Russia, why another cop complained about his low salary, and why a third sighed and said, “When will we ever get rid of Putin?”

In Anya’s case, the police understood that they could do whatever they wanted with a provincial girl, while officers holding Kasparov, Nemtsov and Shenderovich realized that they had to be much more careful. Famous people are like aristocrats, and they enjoy a kind of diplomatic immunity that protects them from physical abuse by the police.

President Vladimir Putin has successfully created a system in which those higher up on the pecking order are allowed to do as they please with their subordinates or with powerless citizens. Putin, for example, has a free hand with the oligarchs, and the governors can do what they want in their fiefdom with local businessmen. Similarly, Moscow cops can get away with abusing a girl from Ryazan.

Russia is enmeshed in a huge criminalized web involving millions of people. Every member of this system benefits from the fruits of his crimes, while swearing absolute loyalty to his boss — the one who grants him the right and privilege to abuse the powers that come with the job.

To be sure, there are millions of people outside this corrupt system who do not commit crimes, but they are often filled with envy when they see how their colleagues get away scot-free with abusing their office. And those who commit crimes are also boiling with envy, thinking to themselves, “Here I am, pocketing only a couple hundred bucks from a simple, provincial girl from Ryazan, while my bosses are able to extort millions.”

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

A Requiem for Russia

Robert Amsterdam refers us to a post on Fistful of Euros that explains the horror of the beast called inflation that is soon to devour Russia: Investment and increasing personal incomes, to the extent they are occurring, will obliterate an economy which has never been able to keep up with demand by sending prices beyond the means of ordinary people. Chaos, crackdown and failure — just as in Soviet times — can be the only result.

Russia has been in the news over the last few days, as much as anything for its recent attempt at “unfair” (the term is the one used by the OCSE) elections. Both Alex and Doug have already commented on this (and Manuel Alvarez has a useful summary of the electoral system and the outcomes it produces here), so in this post, I would like to draw attention to another reason why Russia should be in the news, its growing inflation problem.

As you may, or may not, know, inflation is currently accelerating in Russia, as indeed it is across a large part of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Regular readers of this blog will know something of the precarious situation which exists in the Baltic States (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, a fuller summary of some of the issues arising here can be found in this post). Some, like the Economist, would more or less dismiss the Baltic phenomenon, since the Baltics are, at the end of the day, “pipsqueaks”. But Russia is no pipsqueak, and should Russia be falling victim to some variant or other of the “Baltic syndrome” then this will be no laughing matter (could this be a case of the Baltics sneezing and the global economy catching a cold?). Unfortunately the early warning signs are that it may well be.

The argument I will present is that the sudden acceleration in inflation which we are now witnessing across a whole swathe of emerging economies in Eastern and Central Europe is not simply accidental, or coincidental. Nor is it a simple by-product of collective poor institutional quality, bad government and/or endemic corruption. Of course there is no shortage of all of these, and in varying measure, but there are larger, and in historical terms grander, “big picture” processes at work here, and what is so striking about these countries is that no matter the differences in their policy and institutional mix, under the right circumstances they all go shooting off in the same direction. So what is happening?

Well it seems to be the case that this sudden acceleration in growth and inflation is intimately related to the very specific and unusual demographic profile which most of Eastern Europe has inherited from its recent past. So one of my central arguments is that what we have here is certain a kind of mis-match. A mis-match between a basically third world. “developing-country-type” income level (for this reason they tend to be called “emerging economies”) and a very-first-world-type age structure – in the sense that many of these societies have had below replacement fertility for several decades now, and that the key 25 to 49 age group is now peaking nearly everywhere as a proportion of the total population. Before going further, perhaps I should make one thing clear. The cryptic reference to the standard Econ 101 definition of inflation that I make in the title to this post has nothing directly to do with the concentration of wealth and power which is to be found in today’s Russia. It is rather a reference to Russia’s ongoing population decline, and the way in which the Russian workforce is steadily contracting. Two charts essentially tell it all:

What we should all be able to see at a glance here is that over the next few years Russia is almost certainly going to face a serious crisis in its labor markets (indeed arguably, as we will see below) this is already happening. According to data from the Russian Health and Social Development Ministry, between now and 2010, the country’s workforce is likely to fall by almost 9 million (assuming participation rates remain unchanged, for which see below), from the presnt 74.5 million to the reduced figure of 65.5 million.

This scenario sounds becomes even more preoccupying when we begin to think about the fact that Russia is already losing over 700,000 working-age people every year, due to a lethal combination of high mortality and low birth rates. The low fertility level which currently exists in Russsia is almost normal and commonplace among the ECA (Europe and Central Asia) countries but the high levels of adult mortality at relatively young ages are more or less unique to Ukraine and the CIS, and the persistence of this phenomenon raises a number of very important questions, only some of which are economic ones.

Apart from being in absolute decline Russia’s labor force is also aging rapidly. Russia’s working-age population is shifting from the younger age groups (15-39 years) to the older ones (40-64 years). Of the looming 11 million decline in Russia’s working-age population, over 95 percent of the decrease will come from a decline in the 15-39 age group while less than 5 percent will come from a reduction in 40-64 age group. Of particular importance is the fact that the 25 to 49 age group has now finally peaked, since this age group is of special importance for economic growth for a whole series of reasons.

And the problem only gets worse when we begin to think about the low relatively level of labor mobility and labor flexibility which exists in Russia, the relatively low-level work ethic which characterizes social values in some parts of the country, and the poor quality provision which is on offer in much of the vocational and training system. The labor market development plan for 2007-10, presented recently by Health and Social Development Minister Mikhail Zurabov, is supposed to be an attempt to begin the work of addressing the huge challenge that the situation represents, but even given the best of intentions and an ability to act decisively (both of which are should not by any means be automatically assumed to be present in the world of contemporary Russia), the plan, giving it the very best possible benefit of the doubt, can only be described as a declaration of intent, and meanwhile Russia’s labor market problems remain, surviving from one day to the next in what could only be described as a state of organized chaos.

At one point Russian inflation did seem to have been coming gradually under control, and remained this way into the first quarter of 2007. Since then, however, it has steadily been gaining and sustaining momentum (see chart here), and the problem has only deteriorated with each new monthly reading as the year has advanced. In fact inflation reached a cumulative total of 9.3 percent over the first ten months of 2007, with the rate accelerating to 10.8 percent in October, the highest level recorded since February 2006. This was up from the 9.4 percent registered in September and a month on month increase of 1.6 percent.

The Russian authorities now appear to be resigned to the idea that by year’s end inflation will be running around around 11 percent (Dec-on-Dec) as compared to 9 percent for Dec-on-Dec registered in 2006. And this inflation is, of course, moving on down the line and entering industrial producer prices, and this rise in manufacturing costs is, in turn, the key factor in turning round Russia’s trade surplus (see the Producer Price Index chart here).

The article continues at great length, click through to read the rest.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !