December 21, 2007 — Contents

BREAKING NEWS!

Oleg Kozlovsky has been Shanghaied
into the army in order to silence him.

FRIDAY DECEMBER 21 CONTENTS

(1) Editorial: Pat & Vladimir Sittin’ in a Tree

(2) Economist Rips Simes a New One

(3) Putin Forgets all About Beslan

(4) Shvartsman Speaks

(5) Blogs on Pooty as POTY

NOTE: Pajamas Media editor Michael Weiss (author of a recent piece in the Weekly Standard that appeared on this blog) has a brilliant new essay on the blog exposing the fundamental fraud and ignorance that lies behind Time magazine’s designation of Vladimir Putin as “Person of the Year.” It seems only the American MSM is capable of producing such an utterly vacuous claim as that policies designed by Putin have caused the Russian economy to expand. Thank goodness for us bloggers in our pajamas! Otherwise, Time would still be able to get away with crap like this. See also #5 above.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

EDITORIAL: Pat & Vladimir Sittin’ in a Tree

EDITORIAL

Pat & Vladimir Sitting’ in a Tree

No matter how much time and energy we might spend on this blog gathering and publishing evidence of the horror that is the neo-Soviet Union, perhaps the very best evidence is simply to point out what kind of freakish weirdos the dictator Vladimir Putin has collected for friends and allies over the years. This motley group of lowlifes, losers, and outcasts begins with the national “leaders” like the baboon Alexander Lukashenko, the pond scum known as Hugo Chavez and the blood-sucking leech who rules over Iran.

And then there’s Pat.

Writing in The Post Chronicle on November 30th, Pat Buchanan purported to decry the “blowback” of “Russophobia.” With friends like these, Russia needs no enemies.

Buchanan is a former speech writer for Richard Nixon, the only U.S. president ever forced to resign from office in disgrace in all of American history. In this respect, he shares a past with another crazy Russophile apologist, Dmitry Simes (whose employer is actually The Nixon Center — which ought to be a name only a federal penitentiary could have). We report more about Mr. Simes below. Pat tried to run for president some time ago after being repudiated by the two major parties, and in doing so was even more emphatically rejected by the American voters than by the parties. All the while, he was stealing crucial votes from the Republicans and so helping the left-wingers he supposedly despises come to power, simply to salve his enormous, ponderous ego. He’s a racist, a homophobe, an isolationaist lunatic, pure and simple. He’s a classic example of the very worst America can be, especially when he’s talking about Russia — a country where he’s never lived, whose language he does not speak, whose people he does not know.

If you had to sum up Pat Buchanan in one sentence readily comprehensible to a Russian audience, you’d simply say three words: “He’s America’s Zhirinovsky.”

So naturally, it’s no surprise to learn that Pat loves Vladmir Putin. And if you want to know whether Putin is in the right or in the wrong, all you really have to know is that simple fact, that Pat Buchanan is defending him, and then you understand clearly that Putin must be evil incarnate.

In the PC, Pat wrote: “Our next president will likely face a Russia led by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, determined to stand up to a West that Russians believe played them for fools when they sought to be friends.” Sought to be friends? What affirmative actions did Russia take, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, actions it had a free choice about, to show America that it wanted to be friends? Was Boris Yeltsin’s military attack on the Russian Duma one of those actions? Was Russia’s refusal to hold a contested election between rival political parties an example? How about when Russia obstructed NATO action in Yugoslavia, was that it? Or was it Russia’s maintenance of universal military conscription, the propiska system, and varying admission prices for foreigners at cultural attractions? Since coming to power, what concrete proposal has Russia made to show friendship towards the United States? Russia’s current leader is a man who spent his entire life in the KGB actively working to destroy America: What statements has he ever made disavowing that past and indicating he has changed his mind about America?

Pat doesn’t give one single shred of evidence in response to any of these questions.

Pat opines: “The hubris of Bill Clinton and George Bush II [Pat actually writes Bush I, but later he say that Bush I and Ronald Reagan had converted Russia into an ally, so apparently it's a typo], and the Russophobia of those they brought with them into power, has been a primary cause of the ruptured relationship. And the folly of what they did is evident today, as Putin’s party, United Russia, rolls to triumph on a torrent of abuse and invective against the West.” It’s really amusing to see people who think they are defending Russia say things that Russians hate far more than Russophobia — patronization and ignorance. Does Pat really believe that American policy so dominates Russian psychology that they would choose to be governed by a proud KGB spy just to get back at us, whereas otherwise they would reject the KGB? Can he give one single example in all of Russian history in which the Russian people stood up for freedom and democracy on a nationwide basis? Ironically, the only one showing real “hubris” here is Pat himself. In fact, this is exactly the kind of American arrogance and ignorance that makes many in the world hold the U.S. in contempt.

His arrogance reaches fever pitch as he breathlessly declares: “How did we lose a Russia that Ronald Reagan and Bush I had virtually converted into an ally?” It seems Pat really believes that Russians hated America for decades, then lost the Cold War after Reagan called them an “Evil Empire” and suddenly, magically, miraculously transformed themselves into allies. Hmm. Is that what Americans would have done if they had lost the Cold War, just instantly become communists and fallen in love with the Russians who had defeated them, allying against their old friends with Russia? Only the most blockheaded Americans like Pat are capable of “thinking” in this childish, idiotic manner.

If only it were true that Bill Clinton and George Bush II had aggressively confronted Russia during the formative years of the post-Soviet era, before the KGB got power. If this had been done, then Ukraine and Georgia would already be members of NATO and we would not have seen Russia’s naked display of imperialism towards those states in recent years. If a clear message had been sent that the West insisted on real democracy, then a true contested election might have occurred in 1996 and Boris Yeltsin might not have been reelected, much less able to anoint a proud KGB spy as his successor. And we might not now be facing a new Cold War.

Pat quotes his beloved Putin thusly:

“Those who oppose us,” roared Putin, “don’t want our plans to be completed. They have completely different tasks and a completely different view of Russia. They need a weak, sick state, a disoriented, divided society, so that behind its back they can get up to their dirty deeds and profit at your and my expense.” Putin is referring to the time of the “oligarchs” of the Yeltsin era, who looted Russia when its state assets were sold off at fire-sale prices.

Is Pat unaware that Putin has surrounded himself with a new clan of oligarchs to replace the old? Is he unaware of the fraudulent prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, stopping him from seeking the presidency as Russia’s first real opposition candidate? Is he aware of recent accusations that Putin himself has personally looted Russia’s coffers to the tune of billions? Has he really not heard that so-called “Russophobe” George Bush II declared he had “looked in Putin’s eyes” and “seen his soul” and declared him “trustworthy”? If that’s Russophobia, what did Pat expect — a French kiss?

You bet he’s unaware. Being unaware is Pat’s stock in trade.

Can’t you just imagine some clueless Russian nationalist freak coming across Pat’s little essay and declaring: “Aha! See! We have proof Putin is right!” This kind of thing went on all through the first Cold War until the “mighty” USSR collapsed because of it — one would have thought that having had that experience would teach Russians a thing or two, but it very obviously hasn’t.

Pat simply ignores the rampant electoral fraud that occurred as United Russia came to power. He ignores that on election day less than one-third of Russia’s eligible voters went to the polls to support Putin’s party. Echoing Neville Chamberlain, he seems to think that the only reason Russia is giving weapons to Hugo Chavez, nuclear technology to Iran, money to terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah and buzzing NATO countries with nuclear bombers without any provocation in kind, is that U.S. presidents didn’t say the right friendly words to Russia at the right time — not because of any latent hatred Russians have for the enemy who defeated them.

America has, in fact, been able to convert former enemies like Japan and Germany into ardent allies. But this only happened after America inflicted a physical military defeat on those countries and reorganized them internally, from the ground up, as it is now doing in Iraq. Because of the recalcitrance and cowardliness of folks like Pat, no such confrontation ever occurred in Russia. Because we listened to treacherous morons like him, we trusted Russia to do the right thing on its own — and that was exactly what the KGB wanted, because it gave them time to reorganize and recommence the confrontation. Pat’s plan totally failed, and now he wants us to do it all over again.

Maybe you see now why Pat got decorated as he did in the photograph at the top of this page?

In a recent interview with Time magazine, Putin stated: “If one looks at the map of the world, it’s difficult to find Iraq, and one would think it rather easy to subdue such a small country. But this undertaking is enormous. Iraq is a small but very proud nation.” It’s difficult to describe the blatant dishonesty set forth in this small statement. At the time the U.S. launched its attack on Iraq, the country had one of the top-20 largest military establishments on the face of the Earth, and the U.S. was required to project its power across the Atlantic Ocean, something Russian has never even attempted to do in its entire history. Russia was obliterated in World War I, unable to defend its own contiguous territory, barely survived World War II, and took more than a decade to “subdue” tiny Chechnya, much harder to find on a map than Iraq. Yet, you will not find Putin referring to Chechnya as “very proud nation” but rather only a tiny clan of bandits.

Putin then stated: “We want to be a friend of America. Sometimes we get the impression that America does not need friends auxiliary subjects to command.” Or was that Pat? Kind of difficult to tell them apart, isn’t it?

The idea that the malignant little troll, a lifelong KGB spy, or the man who put in him in power, who bombed the Russian Duma into submission, could ever be considered “friends” of the United States is so utterly ridiculous that it could only be conceived by a lame-brained moron of Pat Buchanan’s stature.

With “friends” like him, Russia needs no enemies.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

The Economist Rips that Rat Bastard Dimitri Simes a New One

The Economist reports:

AMERICA’s blunders risk making Russia into an enemy, argues Dimitri Simes of the Nixon Center in Washington, DC, in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs—and if so, watch out.

His main point is that America mistakenly treated Russia as a defeated enemy at the end of the Cold War. After initially cautious and sensible treatment of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, American administrations then lurched between stinginess, indulgence, suspicion and ill-judged bossiness in their dealings with both Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s former president, and then Vladimir Putin, its current leader.

In the early 1990s, when outside money could have helped Mr Yeltsin’s first “reformist” government survive, none was forthcoming. Later billions were squandered on propping up Russia’s precarious, corrupt and ineffective rulers.

Yeltsin’s excessive use of force against the hardline parliament in 1993, and the first Chechen war (1994-6) both went uncriticised, but Mr Putin’s offers of cooperation against terrorism were first spurned (in 1999) and then abused (after 2001). Meanwhile, America recklessly promoted NATO enlargement and encouraged gadflies like Georgia in Russia’s backyard.

For these and other reasons, Russia’s rulers and its people now distrust America deeply. Thanks to the economic resurgence of recent years, America has little influence on events there. Bad job.

This argument has strong points, but many weak ones. Mr Simes is right to say that Russia was not a defeated adversary. But who said it was? He overlooks the main point, which is that the Soviet system (a Russian empire clothed in totalitarian ideology) had indeed been utterly defeated at home and abroad.

It was right and reasonable for the outside world to try to consolidate that victory in any country that showed willing. Russia objected to the world’s efforts to bring security and prosperity to those once-captive nations; this was telling, but no reason to stop.

Secondly, Russian democrats and reformers indeed deserve great credit for the intellectual and political challenge that they posed to the Soviet system. Mr Gorbachev’s initial reforms allowed them to move them from the fringes of public life to the centre of it.

But the Soviet collapse was the triumph of free markets, free elections, free media, free nations. These are values, institutions and habits exemplified by western Europe and north America. It would have been absurd to soft-pedal them in the hour of victory.

Nobody would dispute that the West made plenty of mistakes in the 1990s—and has done so thereafter. The economic history of those years will be the subject of a future column.

But it is hardly fair to criticise America both for being too soft on Russia’s political flaws in the Yeltsin years, and also for promoting NATO membership for the countries worried by just those trends. America’s democracy-promotion efforts may be self-interested, perhaps even cynically so, but they are a great deal better than the democracy-suppression efforts of the Kremlin.

Hawks may quibble with this and much more besides. But they may find Mr Simes’s conclusion surprisingly agreeable. Russia is not an enemy—yet. But it is heading that way, and could become an alarming one. America should therefore continue to cooperate on terrorism, Iran and proliferation, but treat Russia like China or Kazakhstan: hard-headedly. It should use “words and deeds” (tantalisingly, Mr Simes does not elaborate) to show that America will not tolerate any attempt to recreate the Soviet Union.

“Given the Kremlin’s history of poor policy choices, a clash may come whether Washington likes it or not. And should that happen, the United States must approach this rivalry with greater realism and determination than it has displayed in its half-hearted attempts at partnership”. From a quarter sometimes seen as pro-Kremlin, those are striking words.

Edward Lucas, the magazine’s Russia-expert-in-chief, continues the discussion on his blog:

RUSSIA longs to join the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club mainly comprised of old rich countries that is anxiously trying to expand and stay relevant as the global economy’s centre of gravity shifts south and east.

Earlier this month Poland dropped its objection to Russia, and the OECD agreed to start negotiations. Now the question is whether Russia will manage to raise its standards to the required levels of transparency and good government. If it fails to do so, will the OECD will turn a blind eye, or will the accession talks fizzle out?

Russia first applied to join in 1996, when it was a basket case. Now it is a huge, if not altogether healthy, economy, with GDP over a trillion dollars. That alone is no ticket to membership: China and India are not OECD members, though the organisation is establishing other ties with them.

Since the end of the Cold War, the OECD has been a club strictly for democracies, either rich or nearly so. Now talks have opened with four other countries—Chile, Estonia, Israel and Slovenia—that easily meet that definition, and will likely join pretty quickly. Russia is a different question altogether, both on the demanding technical details of the “roadmap” to meeting OECD standards and on the broader question of “like-mindedness”.

The issue is divisive. Russia’s backers—chiefly Germany and France—prize engagement over the finer points of OECD integrity. Other countries, including but not only Sweden, Britain and America, are more dubious.

Such sceptics note the effects of Russia’s behaviour in other multilateral organisations: it has crippled the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, turning a once-lively democracy-promotion organisation into a sterile talking shop. It has discredited the Council of Europe, which is meant to be the continent’s human rights guardian.

Russia throws its weight around in the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (though even that body flinched when it turned out last week that its partner in a planned venture-capital fund was in fact a Kremlin-sponsored corporate raider). Optimism (or wishful thinking) brought Russia into the then G-7 in 1998. Few would argue in retrospect that this was a wise move.

If Russia joins the OECD while making only pretend reforms, the problem is severe: predatory state activity and other forms of lawless capitalism are certainly not confined to Russia. Once the OECD loses its bark and bite, the developed world will be without its best watchdog on issues of global importance, including money laundering, bribery, corporate governance and reform of bureaucracy.

Will it happen? The OECD operates on the basis of consensus, so all 30 members will need to be satisfied that Russia has truly changed. In theory, that’s a big safeguard. But political pressure, particularly when exercised through big countries, has a way of flattening even the rockiest mountains.

A common Kremlin tactic is to escalate discussion of practical issues to a higher level where political or commercial considerations trump everything else. When President Nicolas Sarkozy of France congratulated Vladimir Putin on his party’s supposed victory at the polls, he demolished the already feeble common EU position criticising the blatant shortcomings of Russia’s parliamentary election. That the French auto manufacturer Renault clinched a juicy deal in Russia later that week was doubtless pure coincidence.

The danger is that Russia’s membership negotiations become politicised too. Objective, practical questions of shortcomings, remedies and evidence may become agenda items to be horse-traded elsewhere. So OECD members will need to stay focussed and resolute when considering Russia’s application. Alas, these aren’t words that leap to mind concerning the West’s approach to the Kremlin so far.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Putin Forgets All About Beslan

The Moscow Times reports:

A dog plays with a kitten, scattering their meal of meat and macaroni over the entrance. An armed security guard looks on and laughs. The walls are covered with dark mold, and the plaster is peeling off. Patients walk carefully, trying to avoid gaping cracks in the well-worn, wooden floor. Beds are placed centimeters apart, and the old doors do not close all the way to provide privacy. The toilets are easy to find. Just follow the smell.

“Welcome to Beslan’s hospital,” said Savely Torchinov, a surgeon, while giving a reporter a tour of the town’s only hospital.

It was here that survivors were taken after the terrorist attack at Beslan School No. 1 in 2004. The hospital looks much the same today as it did then, and some former hostages are still undergoing treatment here for injuries sustained in the attack.

“It’s shocking, isn’t it?” Torchinov said.

He opened the door to the nurses’ room — a narrow space where the sweet aroma of coffee that the nurses were drinking mixed with the pungent smell of disinfectant. On a small trolley, opposite the refrigerator, surgical instruments could be seen through a threadbare cloth covered with brownish stains. Torchinov said fewer people might have died in the school attack if they had received first aid promptly. The hospital was unprepared to cope with the hundreds of injured hostages after a three-day standoff at the school ended in gunfire and explosions on Sept. 3, 2004, he and other staff said. After receiving initial treatment at the hospital, the patients were sent to better-equipped facilities in Vladikavkaz, the North Ossetian capital, about 20 kilometers away, and Moscow. Around 1,200 people were held hostage in the school, and about 330 died, more than half of them children.

President Vladimir Putin arrived in Beslan on the night of Sept. 4 and he “nearly broke his neck” when he tripped on a crack in the wooden floor on the second floor, Torchinov said. The president was so shocked that he ordered that 6.2 million rubles ($240,000) in federal aid be allocated to renovate the hospital. The local government promised another 8 million rubles ($320,000).

LR: Only $240,000 from a country rolling in oil profits to a region whose population of children has been decimated in the most horrible way imaginable? Is that Putin’s idea of generosity?

But little appears to have been done to improve the hospital, and the situation looks unlikely to change. Torchinov and other people who have raised questions about the hospital said they had been threatened with the loss of their jobs and arrest. Torchinov was one of the few people in Beslan who agreed to allow his name to be printed for this report; others said they feared reprisals.The hospital denied wrongdoing, and the local prosecutor refused to comment.

LR: An after his pathetic, puny promise, no action whatsoever. And this man is considered a great leader? Putin thought NOTHING about Beslan before the attack, and immediately forgot about it afterwards. He’s a monster.

Torchinov, a surgeon at the hospital for 22 years, is currently without work after a court found him guilty of negligence in the death of a patient and suspended him from practicing for 18 months. But Torchinov, who calls the case politically motivated, had no problem visiting the hospital on a recent afternoon. Doctors, nurses and even the guard greeted him as he showed the reporter around. On Sept. 3, the last day of the terrorist attack, Torchinov made sure that his daughter Laima, who was among the hostages, was safe. Then he rushed over to the hospital, organized a makeshift operating room, and started operating. “I operated in a narrow space between two sinks and close to the window to get some light. Not only could I not see anything because I had no surgical lamps, but I also could hardly move. There was no space,” he said. “My first patient was a girl of 13 or 15. She had a bad cut on her stomach, and I operated on her in such conditions, close to the window to get the light of the sun. Military surgeons usually work in better conditions,” he said.

Doctors operated on people right on hospital gurneys, and anesthesia was given with obsolete equipment. The single new device was not enough for all the wounded. “We lost so many people because of all that,” Torchinov said. “Things were different than what the media showed. It was complete chaos.” Torchinov and his colleagues said the authorities had ample time during the two days before the standoff ended to prepare for the wounded. “They could have set up field hospitals and brought modern equipment from other cities. They had two days after all, but nobody cared,” one doctor said. “We didn’t have enough medicine, and some people died because there were no spare oxygen tanks.” Torchinov said a federal special forces officer died because he needed an arterial specialist and the Beslan hospital had none. He said the officer died waiting for the specialist in Vladikavkaz. “We could have saved more lives. It was terrible,” the other doctor said. The authorities organized only four operating rooms, and the doctors set up three more.

After Torchinov started complaining about the way the aid had been organized and that promised funding for the hospital had not materialized, he was accused of malpractice in 2006. Beslan’s prosecutor accused Torchinov of leaving a piece of gauze inside the abdomen of a woman he operated on last year. She later died. Torchinov spent 1 1/2 months in detention before North Ossetia’s top court convicted him and suspended from practicing for 18 months. Torchinov accused the hospital administration of being in cahoots with the prosecutor and called the case a politically motivated attempt to silence him. “Everyone in the hospital thinks that,” agreed Alan Aderkhayev, an anesthetist at the hospital. “The accusations are just absurd,” Aderkhayev said. “Most people agree with Torchinov, but they don’t talk because they are afraid.” Aderkhayev did not tend to hostages in 2004 because he was dealing with a more personal grief. His wife and daughter died in the attack.

The head of the hospital, Vyacheslav Korginov, denied that the administration had unfairly targeted Torchinov. “A commission of experts said the woman’s death was Torchinov’s fault. It was for the prosecutor’s office to decide and not me. There is nothing political here,” Korginov said. Beslan prosecutor Alan Batagov refused to comment on the case, saying he could not discuss it with someone he did not know. Korginov defended the hospital’s treatment of the hostages. “Our work was really appreciated,” he said. He said the hospital had received the promised federal and regional funds after the attack. He also said government auditors had found no problems during regular checks of the hospital books. Korginov acknowledged, however, that the hospital needed improvements. “We need a renovation, but other hospitals need this too. This is normal,” he said.

Susanna Dudiyeva, head of the Beslan Mothers’ Committee, a nongovernmental organization that supports former hostages and their families, said she could not understand why the hospital remained in a dilapidated state in a town that was flooded with cash and gifts from around the world after the attack. “Everyone helped us. Our hospital should be perfect. Why is it in such a pitiable condition?” she said.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Shvartsman Speaks

The Financial Times reports:

Oleg Shvartsman, a fund manager, claims he is a hero of Russia’s new times. Operating out of an office which shares the same Red Square address as the Kremlin’s property department, he says he wants to lead a “velvet reprivatisation” drive of assets “illegally” won in Russia’s 1990s privatisations: not just the strategic assets that have already become a target for the state but small and medium enterprises in the regions too.

“These enterprises were built by our fathers and our grandfathers, and all of a sudden in one moment these enterprises became owned by individuals by the decision of one official who was paid cash. This is not just. This is not supported by the people,” Mr Shvartsman told the Financial Times.

Russian business daily Kommersant published an interview earlier this month with Mr Shvartsman in which he said he was leading a reprivatisation drive to “hoover up” assets via “voluntary-coercive methods” with the backing of Kremlin officials. Mr Shvartsman became a political bogeyman and a new player in a growing war between Kremlin clans overnight.

He also used the interview to say he was managing some $3.2bn (€2.2bn, £1.6bn) in assets for unnamed “political figures” connected to the Kremlin’s hardline “power bloc”. Soon after its publication, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and Tamir Fishman, an Israeli investment bank, said they were pulling out of plans to create a Russian venture fund in which Mr Shvartsman was to be a minority partner.

In his first interview with the western press, Mr Shvartsman backed off from assertions that his fund was tied to the Kremlin and insisted that Kommersant had “distorted” his words. But he stood by his calls for a state-backed “reprivatisation” drive. When pressed over the potential Kremlin ties of the backers of his company, Finans-Group, which has accumulated stakes in strategic industries, he added: “We are not going to check whether [investors] are relatives of administration officials.”

He added: “I have partners who enter either on the condition that they bring money or possibilities.”

It is difficult to tell whether – as some Russian observers have claimed – Mr Shvartsman is just a pawn in a complex political chess game between Russia’s warring elite. He says Kommersant portrayed him as a victim of the political infighting that broke out as Russia prepares for a transfer of power next year.

“This is an element of an internal clan battle,” he said of the Kommersant interview, which came after the arrest of Sergei Storchak, deputy finance minister, in an alleged embezzlement case widely seen as an attack on more liberal factions by hardliners led by Igor Sechin, Kremlin deputy chief of staff . “The situation has been used to discredit the ‘power’ ministries among others and in a certain way they have achieved this . . . I have become a hostage of this situation.”

But others, including several former senior government officials, say there is a large grain of truth in the Kommersant interview. The newspaper has published documents that show he signed off on every page of the interview, as well as audio files of extracts.

He is representative of a growing political class of mid-level managers working for the state, with ties to the security services, who believe it is time for Russia’s nascent class of business owners to hand their property back to the state, former government officials said. “This was a manifesto for state raiding,” said Alexander Temerko, a former vice-president of Yukos, the defunct oil group once run by jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. “There are a lot of companies like his, and now there are so many of them they are a force.”

The state’s attack on Yukos – led by Mr Sechin, who is also chairman of Rosneft, the state-owned energy group that has swallowed most of Yukos’s assets – began the process of using tax charges and other alleged infractions to retake property for the state. Mr Shvartsman says he wants to continue that process on a regional level, only this time with compensation for business owners who sell their shares back to the state.

Businessmen are preparing for the worst. A recent opinion poll by the Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, Russia’s big business lobby, found 58 per cent of businessmen questioned believed there should be a partial review of privatisation results. The Communist party this weekend reverted to past calls to overturn 1990s privatisations.

Against that backdrop, Mr Shvartsman intends to announce today the creation of his own political movement, called For a Transparent Russia.

Vladimir Putin, Russian president, even weighed in unexpectedly to the debate, calling last week for limits on the power of new state corporations to make sure they did not encroach on other enterprises.

But Mr Shvartsman said he was working on contracts with the government’s federal property fund to consolidate control of mid-sized businesses that were ignoring the state’s property rights and paying insufficient tax.

But he denied his company could use law enforcement structures to coerce owners into handing over their holdings. “Every entrepreneur uses the legal system to defend his interests. I am no exception. The only difference is that I act in the interests of the state.” He said he was calling on the west not to fear the idea of a “velvet reprivatisation”. Western companies would be offered stakes as a way of bringing in much needed technology and expertise once state consolidation was completed, he said.

Mr Shvartsman said a key idea of his business was to support law enforcement organisations and army veterans via donations through a fund known as SSSR, the Union for Social Justice in Russia. Valentin Varennikov, a former army general and member of parliament, is the head of its supervisory council.

But Yevgeny Shakhov, the head of the SSSR, says he has known Mr Shvartsman for years but says he still cannot understand his comments. “I don’t know what got into his head,” Mr Shakhov said. “He got into politics and then I don’t understand what happened.”

Clan wars

Oct 1 2007 – General Alexander Bulbov of Russia’s Federal Anti-Drugs Service, who was investigating a corruption case alleged to involve members of the FSB, or KGB’s successor, is arrested

Oct 9 – Viktor Cherkesov, head of the anti-drugs service, warns in an open letter to Kommersant newspaper of a “war” between different wings of the security services

Nov 23 – Sergei Storchak, deputy finance minister, is arrested and charged with attempted embezzlement of $43m (€30m, £21.5m) of state funds in what is seen as a possible attack by Kremlin hardliners. His boss, liberal finance minister Alexei Kudrin, defends him

Nov 30 – Fund manager Oleg Shvartsman tells Kommersant he is leading a “velvet reprivatisation” drive linked to Kremlin officials. He later disowns part of the interview and says it was used as part of clan battles

Dec 2 – The pro-Kremlin United Russia party wins 64 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections

Dec 6 – Prosecutors say they have dropped a second legal case against Mr Storchak, but a rival investigative agency presses for the case to be pursued and says $1m in cash was found in Mr Storchak’s apartment

Dec 10 – Vladimir Putin, Russian president, anoints Dmitry Medvedev, a relative liberal, as his presidential successor, seen as a defeat for Kremlin hardliners

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Blogs on Putin as "Person of the Year"

Slate magazine has a roundup of blog reactions to Time magazine naming Vladimir Putin “person of the year.” MediaBlog sums it up when it points out that the action “dusts off the long-disused tradition of recognizing the year’s biggest bad guy as its top newsmaker. Not since 1979 has a dictator been POY.”

The Kremlin stated:

“It’s very good news for us, very good news. We treat it as an acknowledgement of the role that was played by President Putin in helping to pull Russia out of the social troubles and economic troubles of the 1990s,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

The Kremlin also thought it was “good news” when Stalin was named man of the year — twice. One must wonder, however, if Russians are proud that Putin is now in the same club as Adolf Hitler. You have to feel the Kremlin’s pain: They can’t exactly take credit for an award from “evil America” because then America isn’t so evil (Putin specifically denounced what he sees as intentional American anti-Russian propaganda when speaking to Time) and the Kremlin’s policy begins to seem insane. Yet, they can’t exactly refuse to notice an award from the world’s only superpower, either. What to do, what to do.

Blogger BlackFive has this to say:

Michael Goldfarb over at The Weekly Standard catches John McCain with a much more accurate assessment of what lies in Putin’s eyes than either W or Time.

Earlier today, the Boston Globe reported earlier comments by McCain on the Russian president and soon to be prime minister that played off Bush’s famous remark in 2001 that he’d looked into Putin’s eyes and gained “a sense of his soul.” McCain sees something different:

“I looked into his eyes and saw three letters: a K, a G and a B.

You have to abso-fu**in-lutely be kidding me, Putin Person of the Year.

No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin’s. The Russian President’s pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking.

You are a complete Muppet Mr. Stengel. There is another, more accurate description of Putin’s eyes, he is a cold-blooded, steely-eyed killer. By nature or nurture isn’t really important any more. Putin has presided over the looting of every item of value or industry in Russia, he kills his political opponents and journalists as well you fool. He is a criminal totalitarian who would leave Joe Stalin gasping in admiration at his audacity. He just crowned his successor who promptly named him Prime Minister, really there’s a shocker.

It’s long been known that the media has a serious bias, but to show this level of cluelessness is amazing. Vladimir Putin? FFS, the only thing I can think of is they are pining for the good old days when we had two superpowers and W couldn’t just run around invading places. The idea that Putin has been a net good for Russia is comical unless you believe a country runs best when criminal enterprises run all major industries in a patronage pyramid leadng right back to Vlad the Impaler, the government controls the only media outlets they haven’t shut down, and the news comes straight from the Kremlin press office. Oh did I mention they shoot journalists.

I am done, this is too stupid to waste any more time on, what clowns our elite media are.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !