Draconian Neo-Soviet Travel Restrictions Appear

The Moscow Times reports that Russia has enacted a set of draconian neo-Soviet restrictions on the movements of foreigers within Russia. Logically, all Western governments with citizens subject to these restrictions should now adopt the same rules for Russians traveling in the West. Of course, these restrictions provide the Kremlin with yet anther excuse to harass, jail and eject any foreigner who dares to fail to toe the Kremlin line:

Thinking of jetting up to St. Petersburg for a week to see White Nights this summer? If you’re a foreigner and you want to spare your employer from a possible $30,000 fine, you’d better make sure the government knows you’re leaving town. According to a new law that came into effect Jan. 15, foreigners are now required to hand over their registration papers to migration officials — via their employer or other sponsor — every time they leave the country and re-register upon subsequent entry into the country. But the law is steeped in vagaries. Visa agencies say foreigners could incur heavy fines for their employers if they neglect to inform them of even a short trip out of town.

Hotels, for their part, say the amount of documentation on their foreign guests has become unduly burdensome. At least one St. Petersburg hotel has stopped admitting foreigners altogether.

The new law says a foreigner’s “inviting party” — an employer, landlord, hotel or other Russian host — is required to inform local migration officials of the foreigner’s arrival within three working days of entering the country. The inviting party is also required to inform authorities if the foreigner leaves Russia and it has two working days from the day of departure to do so. “The foreigner has to be stricken off the Federal Migration Service register, because he can’t be registered with the Federal Migration Service if he is not in Russia,” said Zalina Filimonova, spokeswoman for the Moscow branch of the migration service. “That’s pure logic.”

The law has been touted by migration officials as a simplification of the registration process. On paper, after all, the inviting party is merely required to submit information about the foreigner’s passport, visa and migration card to the local branch of the migration service. Migration officials then issue a registration card that the foreigner carries at all times as proof of being in the country legally. The card makes obsolete the previous practice of placing a registration stamp in passports.

In theory, the entire process can even be done at the post office, with a post office receipt serving as confirmation of a foreigner’s registration. But the new procedures could prove to be quite a hassle for foreigners who travel often — either internationally or within Russia, said Yekaterina Elekchyan of Your Lawyer, a legal firm specializing in visa and work-regulation issues. “On the one hand, it’s easier in that the landlord doesn’t have to physically go down to the DEZ,” Elekchyan said, referring to the local building-utilities administrator offices that were obligatory stopovers for foreigners’ landlords under the old registration rules. “But for a foreigner who enters and leaves the country quite often, it’s not very convenient to have to turn in documents every time.” Foreigners must turn in their registration card when they leave for another region, Filimonova said. Then, upon arrival, the inviting party must register the foreigner with local migration officials within three days and inform them of his departure no later than two days after he leaves.

Under the law, the inviting party is fully responsible for registering the foreigner. According to information posted on the web site of the Moscow branch, fines for breaching the rules run up to 4,000 rubles for a Russian citizen hosting a foreigner and up to 800,000 rubles ($30,000) for employers. One large Western-managed company informed its foreign employees recently in an internal memo that they would have any fines deducted from their salaries if they did not inform the company of their international travel plans. Federal Migration Service spokesman Denis Soldatikov said Friday that authorities would not be “hunting” down violators. “But if people are found in violation, they will be fined,” he said.

Inexplicably, Soldatikov contradicted the deadlines and procedures given in the law itself. He said the inviting party must inform authorities of a foreigner’s arrival within 30 days and departure with 10 days. Soldatikov — in another contradiction of what the law says — also insisted that a foreigner does not have to turn in the registration card upon leaving the country.

Alexei Filipenkov, deputy chairman of Association of European Businesses’ visa task force, said the law is so muddled and riddled with holes that it is impossible to enforce. “Nobody knows what is going on,” he said. “I ask one migration official what to do, and he tells me one thing. On the same day I go to another official, and they tell me something completely different. Nobody knows what is going on because the rules are constantly being changed.”

One group that is already lobbying for changes in the law are hoteliers. One large Moscow hotel said it has had to hire two employees to deal exclusively with filling out the increased paperwork for foreign guests, and because the local branch of the migration service is understaffed, the employees themselves must sit down and enter the data into the migration service’s system. “Until our employee sits down and enters every single form in to their system by manually typing, no one is registered,” said an executive from the hotel, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing company policy. Soldatikov, the migration service spokesman, denied that hotel employees might be entering information into the migration service’s database. “Access to those computers is restricted,” he said. Soldatikov said hotels had no grounds for complaint and that the system had changed little for them.

One small hotel chain in St. Petersburg, however, has stopped accepting foreigners for fear that a single violation of the new law could result in a hefty fine. “Fortunately it’s not high season yet, and primarily Russian citizens are on business trips,” Marina Slesareva, deputy head of the Rinaldi chain, told Komsomolskaya Pravda. “It’s scary to think what will happen in the summer. Not one single branch of the Federal Migration Service can tell us what to do under the new rules.”

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The Khodorkovsky Charges: Proof that there is No Justice in Russia

Robert Amsterdam, Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s American lawyer, has announced that Russia intends to put his client on trial for the same offense twice inside MK’s prison in Siberia rather than in court. Siberian Light points out that MK is being charged with “laundering” nearly twice as much money as his maximum net worth, which “shouts out ‘politically motivated charge’.” Amsterdam adds that when, upon learning of the news that his client would be charged, Khodorkovsky’s Russian lawyer Yuri Schmidt tried to fly to Siberia to meet with his client and was promptly arrested by Moscow authorities at the airport and subjected to harassment. In other words, for all these reasons and more, it’s clear that there is no such thing as “justice” in neo-Soviet Russia any more. The regime will do as it likes no matter what the “law” might be, and the lemming-like population will sit by and watch it happen, just as in the days of Stalin.

Amsterdam speculates on the classic neo-Soviet reasons why the Kremlin would want to make a move against the lawyers:

According to our political technologist, the detentions were probably a “dry run” rehearsal of sorts, a “bench test” on a small scale in a safe and controlled environment, where there wouldn’t be any major repercussions if anything went wrong. Better to make mistakes now and have a chance to correct them than to fall flat on one’s face during some really important stage of the game. The power doesn’t like to look weak.

So, what could they have been “testing”? Take your pick – in Russia’s culture of secrecy, nobody will ever know for sure:

• Do the police respond quickly and efficiently to a political order that comes down from above?

• Who are the first people the defense phones in a crisis? (Answer: human rights groups and the domestic and international press, all of whom immediately spread the news worldwide. By allowing the lawyers to make these phone calls during an insignificant incident, the authorities have now learned their “political technology” paradigm.)

• Do they phone anyone in government – is there anybody still left in the halls of power whom they might still consider sympathetic to their cause? (If so, such people are clearly potential enemies and need to be removed from their posts.)

• How does the press respond to such an event? Is the case still newsworthy? (Answer: thankfully for us, yes!)

• Which “press organs” give the story the quickest and deepest and most objective coverage? (These are clearly a threat that needs to be neutralized.)

• In what ways is the true story distorted by the time it hits the headlines? (Useful knowledge if you want to use the “press organs” you control to help “shape” reality for public consumption.)

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Lipman on the Market Crackdown

A reader points us to the latest analysis of the Carnegie Center’s Masha Lipman in the Washington Post, where she exposes the outrageously racist crackdown in the Russian marketplace:

The government recently outlawed foreign migrant workers at Russian retail markets as of April 1. A similar restriction cuts out middlemen by requiring that at least half of all salespeople sell their own produce. The official rationale is that this legislation protects domestic producers. But this politically motivated, hasty decision is more likely to harm Russian consumers and further exacerbate the situation of migrant workers.

The affected markets are vast premises where salesmen pay for counter space and offer produce and other goods such as clothes. Buyers looking for lower prices or fresher produce than in conventional stores find such foods as homegrown or imported fruit and vegetables, homemade preserves, cottage cheese, pickles, meat and fish.

Given Russia’s climate, throughout most of the year vegetables and especially fruit are imported from warmer parts of the world. But the law seeks to impose the same pattern on all regions, even though the products and markets in southern Russian and areas beyond the polar circle are not at all alike. Without the choices provided by middlemen, diet options in many places will be reduced to carrots, potatoes, cabbage and little else.

The new regulations were probably a reaction to growing ethnic intolerance, which took an alarming turn late last summer when a riot in the northwestern town of Kondopoga forced non-Slavic residents to flee, and their businesses were looted and burned. The Russian government is concerned about controlling such hostility, especially in an election year, when any sign of autonomous activism is regarded as a potential threat to the political status quo.

Propagation of tolerance is only a marginal policy for the Kremlin — it would hardly be efficient given the current degree of xenophobia — so instead it opted to co-opt the spreading nationalist sentiments. In October, President Vladimir Putin called for “additional measures to improve trade in . . . retail markets in order to protect the interests of the Russian manufacturers and . . . the native population of Russia.” He reiterated this concern, in a more balanced form, in his annual news conference on Thursday, saying that “labor market issues . . . have not always been settled to the benefit of Russia’s own people, its own citizens.”

By this time, however, government monitoring had found that migrant workers at the markets were not a national issue: They were in high proportion to natives only in Moscow and the Far East.

This is not surprising, since those regions are the two that experience workforce shortages, making migrant workers a necessity. In Far East areas near China, this need is filled by Chinese workers, many of whom cross the border to sell cheap goods.

The new regulations have already pushed Chinese traders to sell their stock at catchpenny prices and leave. And local news reports indicate that the markets are staying empty: “The benefit of the new regulation looks vague. But the disadvantages are evident,” reported a newspaper in Sakhalin, in the Far East. “For the time being there’s no replacement for the cheap Chinese goods and southern fruit.”

A Moscow official echoed those concerns: “Do we want to leave the Muscovites without tangerines, raisins and dried apricots?”

Other problems are expected because the law enables employers to cancel contracts with migrant workers without a court decision. Significant numbers of migrant workers could find themselves jobless. Meanwhile, Muscovites are unlikely to want the low-paying, menial jobs of market salesmen. “The citizens of Russia don’t wait in lines to take those 28 to 30 thousand jobs in market trade that [the new law] will require. This is a serious vacuum that will have to be filled before April 1,” the Moscow official said.

These consequences should have been obvious before the law was enacted. But there wasn’t much time — or desire — for discussion, as is the case when an initiative originates with the president. After Putin asked his ministers to protect native manufacturers at the markets, the cabinet issued a regulation restricting foreigners’ presence in retail trade; in less than three months a bill was put together, passed by both chambers of parliament and signed into law.

Such actions corrode what respect for law and lawmaking is left here. Local officials will probably think of ways around the restrictions, and some are sure to take advantage of new opportunities for graft. Still others expect that the absurdity of some provisions and the damage the law is inflicting on consumers will lead to its revision. Indeed, shortly after the new regulations — drafted by his own ministry at the president’s urging — took effect, German Gref, the minister of economic development and trade, said a full ban on the employment of migrant foreign workers may be postponed.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Dear Readers

Dear Readers,

Just a brief little observation. Indulge a slightly long-winded introduction, won’t you?

Did you ever notice the bizarre nature of the criticism La Russophobe receives from the wacko Russophile set? One minute, they accuse this blog of being devoid of editorializing, doing nothing more than copying the view of others from various sources, and hence being unoriginal. The next minute, they accuse us of doing nothing but editorializing, spewing out endless ideological tirades that betray our personal “hatred” of Russia.

The one point of commonality between these two crazily irreconcilable viewpoints is that, at bottom, they both constitute personal attacks on us rather than an attempt to address the substance of our content. In other words, it’s an attempt to distract attention from out content itself. This is the best indication there is of how rock-solid and hard-hitting our content really is, and we couldn’t be more delighted.

Oh yeah, the point, the point. We digress. Well, you see, we admit that the first viewpoint does have the most truth in it. As we’ve said from the beginning, the purpose of this blog is to document the rise of the neo-Soviet state by aggregating the news from the most reliable and varied sources we can find proving that it is occurring. In our own humble opinion, this blog is by far the best aggregator of news on Russia on this planet, and nobody who doesn’t read it daily can claim to have any real understanding of what is going on in Russia today. What our critics can’t seem to grasp is that nobody else in the whole wide world is doing what we’re doing, and that makes us quite original indeed and accounts for why LR is so popular. The popularity is infuriating to them, but even more so they just can’t stand the organized presence of all these facts, making it so much harder for them to continue their propagandizing.

Still not the point. Sorry. Just can’t resist poking those wacky Russophiles. The point is this: Because we’re engaged in doing this, we’re in a position to warn you that things are getting pretty darn ugly pretty darn fast in Russia, much faster than even we ever dared dream possible. We can illustrate this for you by simply telling you that in the early going, we had virtually no backup in our publishing log. That simply means that each day, we published everything we had available.

We can’t even come close to doing that anymore. At present, we’re running a backlog that can reach a dozen posts or more, and we’re cutting some material that we simply don’t have space for. We feel like those doctors in M*A*S*H trying to decide which horribly wounded person to operate on first. If we kept on publishing everything we have every day, we’d innundate the blog and important material would get lost in the shuffle.

We have so much stuff because things are getting just that nasty in Russia. It’s literally a physical challenge to organize and prioritize all the bad news. Another indication of how bad things are getting over there is the increasingly virulent rhetoric being lobbed at this blog by the Russophile wackos as they scurry to rationalize and defend the rise of a neo-Soviet state that is not only indefensible but unimaginable and unacceptable, and yet so horrifyingly real.

In short, as Bette Davis said in All About Eve: “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

Yours truly,

La Russophobe

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Annals of Russophile Hypocrisy

By now, La Russophobe‘s readers know only too well that if there’s one thing she simply can’t stand above all else, it’s hypocrisy — when a person says one thing and does the opposite. The Russophile lunatics are particularly given to this form of behavior, as when the eXile tabloid criticized LR for being anonymous in an article with no byline that relied on an anonymous source. Since LR practices anonymity, she doesn’t criticize others for engaging in it.

Another recent example is the ZheZhe blog to which La Russophobe has previously made reference. On its home page, ZheZhe claims that its publisher is “not a Russophile.” That’s a blatant lie. The publisher of ZheZhe not only unquestioningly published the ravings of apparent (and certainly de facto) Kremlin shill Julia Svetlichnaya as she launched a smear campaign against Alexander Litvinenko (LR’s questions to Ms. Svetlichnaya on ZheZhe have stood unanswered for weeks now), but the publisher also participates in an e-mail cabal of the most frenzied Russophile extremists, led by Russophile maniac Peter LaVelle [sic, it’s our policy to misspell his dishonest, propagandizing name on purpose], heaping fuel upon their fire in the most shameless manner (while not saying a single word about it to readers — though granted he has precious few).

Here’s a sample of the endless tirades spewed forth amidst that cabal against LR by the publisher of ZheZhe (taken from e-mails circulated a few days ago):

It makes no difference if this sort of zealotry (and idiocy) is coming from a blogger, an academic, a lawyer, an international financier, or from the mainstream press. Each of their audiences, though varied in size and scope and with various degrees of crossover amongst themselves, when combined form a larger group with an unfavorably biased and distorted view that serves a specific agenda rather than portraying the objective Russian reality. With all the interest generated on this list regarding Russia and “bad press” im surprised more people on this list are content to ignore LR. O mean really, do the people here think that its only their opinions that matter or get exposure? And just like the NYT’s audience is not FOX’s audience, this list is not LR’s audience. The problem with LR is that there are far, far more of “them” than there are of “us”. Sorry to get all cold war-ish…

Us. Them. Cold war. Zealtry. Idiocy. Now LR asks you: Are those the comments of an unbiased, objective observer of Russia? And note the unbridled arrogance. HE knows the “truth” about Russia, and anybody who dares disagree is a quack. Next stop, a Russian psychiatric prison, perhaps?

One member of the e-mail group states: “Yes, there’s a lot of tinfoil hattery here but what strikes me is that LsR is picked up (quite often too) by a rather more important blog Publius Pundit and I’ve seen it quoted elsewhere.” It’s quite amazing how utterly out of touch with reality a group like this can get. La Russophobe isn’t “picked up” by Publius Pundit. She’s a member of the creative team at that blog and the material which appears there is written by her and original to that blog.

The sad thing is that some of these cretins are undoubtedly able to convince themselves that they actually aren’t biased. You know, like “I’m not pro-Nazi or anything, I’m just saying that you’re taking a really one-sided view of the concentration camps and you need to try to see both sides of the issue. After all, Hitler was basically a decent man who was provoked and was just trying to . . . “

This is exactly the way we ended up with Stalin.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !

Sorokin on Putin’s Dictatorship

The German Daily Der Spiegel publishes the following extended interview with Russian author Vladimir Sorokin (pictured, left) whom DS describes as “one of the best- known contemporary authors in Russia. He established his literary reputation in the West with his novels “The Queue,” and “Ice.” In his latest book, “Day of the Oprichnik,” he describes Russia in the year 2028 as a nationalist country ruled with an iron fist that has shut itself off from the West by building a wall.”

SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, in your new novel “Day of the Oprichnik,” you portray an authoritarian Russia ruled by a group of members of the secret police. The story is set in the future, but this future is similar to the past under Ivan the Terrible. Aren’t you really drawing parallels to today’s Russia?

Sorokin: Of course it’s a book about the present. Unfortunately, the only way one can describe it is by using the tools of satire. We still live in a country that was established by Ivan the Terrible.

SPIEGEL: His reign was in the 16th century. The czardom was followed by the Soviet Union, then democracy under (former President Boris) Yeltsin and (current President Vladimir) Putin. Has Russia not yet completed its break with the past?

Sorokin: Nothing has changed when it comes to the divide between the people and the state. The state demands a sacred willingness to make sacrifices from the people.

SPIEGEL: The absolute ruler in your book bears some resemblance to President Vladimir Putin …

Sorokin: … which was not my intention. Coming up with a Putin satire wouldn’t be very thrilling. I’m an artist, not a journalist. And a novel is not a documentary. In my book, I am searching for an answer to the question of what distinguishes Russia from true democracies.

SPIEGEL: What explanation have you found?

Sorokin: Germans, Frenchmen and Englishmen can say of themselves: “I am the state.” I cannot say that. In Russia only the people in the Kremlin can say that. All other citizens are nothing more than human material with which they can do all kinds of things.

SPIEGEL: In old Russian, the word “oprichnik” means “a special one.” Do you feel that the divide between the top and the bottom in Russia today can no longer be bridged?

Sorokin: In our country there are special people who are permitted to do anything. They are the sacrificial priests of power. Anyone who is not a member of this group has no clout with the state. One can be as pure as can be — just as magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky was — and still lose everything in a flash and end up in prison. The Khodorkovsky case is typical of the “oprichnina” — the system of oppression I describe.

SPIEGEL: Does a character like Khodorkovsky appear in your book?

Sorokin: Such a parallel didn’t occur to me. However, my book does begin with an attack on a rich man. This is almost a daily occurrence nowadays. It has always been that way in Russia. Only those who are loyal to the people in power can become wealthy.

SPIEGEL: How is the elite reacting to the literary images you paint?

Sorokin: The reaction to my book has been tumultuous. But I had no other choice than to put all this on paper. I have been carrying around this wish for a long time, and so it took me only three months to write it.

SPIEGEL: Why did you suddenly feel the need to write this book?

Sorokin: The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical. This was one of our favorite anecdotes: As German troops marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That was our attitude — you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life.

SPIEGEL: Some of your novels are filled with violence. In “Ice,” for example, human beings are mistreated with hammers made of ice. Why is Russian society still so preoccupied with violence?

Sorokin: As a child I perceived violence as a sort of natural law. In the totalitarian Soviet Union, oppression held everything together. It was the sinister energy of our country. I had that sense by as early as kindergarten and grade school. Later on I wanted to understand why human beings are unable to do without violence. It’s a mystery I haven’t solved to this day. Yes, violence is my main theme.

SPIEGEL: How is this sinister energy reflected in Russia today?

Sorokin: It is alive in every bureaucrat. Whenever you encounter a minor official, he lets you know that he is above you and that you depend on him. It is reflected in the superpower mentality that nourishes the Kremlin. An empire always demands sacrifices from its people.

SPIEGEL: Criminal proceedings were launched against you five years ago for supposedly pornographic passages in your novel “Blue Bacon Fat.” Is censorship about to be reintroduced in Russia?

Sorokin: What happened at the time was an attempt to test writers’ steadfastness and the public’s willingness to accept open censorship. It didn’t work.

SPIEGEL: Did the pressure that was applied to you intimidate other writers?

Sorokin: Certainly. I have Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin to thank that a Russian writer can not only write anything he wants today, but also publish it. I don’t know what will happen in the future. The media — television, newspapers and magazines — are already controlled by the state today.

SPIEGEL: One of the characters in your book brags “that not just one diplomat was expelled from Moscow, not just one journalist was thrown from the television tower and not just one whistleblower was drowned in the river.” When you wrote this you knew nothing about the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.

Sorokin: I just imagined what would happen to Russia if it isolated itself completely from the Western world — that is, if it erected a new Iron Curtain. There is much talk about Russia being a fortress. Orthodox churches, autocracy and national traditions are supposed to form a new national ideology. This would mean that Russia would be overtaken by its past, and our past would be our future.

SPIEGEL: How realistic is such a relapse in a globalized world?

Sorokin: Putin likes to quote a sentence from Czar Alexander III, who said that Russian has only two allies — the army and the navy. As a citizen, this makes me sit up and take notice. This is a concept of self-imposed isolation, a defense strategy that sees Russia surrounded by enemies. When I turn on the TV I see a general calmly claiming that our missiles are ahead of the latest American models by three five-year plans. It’s a nightmare. We are creating a concept of the enemy, just as they did in the Soviet era. This is a giant step backward.

SPIEGEL: You have no confidence in the current Kremlin administration?

Sorokin: This is their fault, not mine. My television teaches me that everything was wonderful in the Soviet Union. According to the programs I watch, the KGB and apparatchiks were angels, and the Stalin era was so festive that the heroes of the day must still be celebrated today.

SPIEGEL: Why is there no opposition from Russia’s legendary intelligentsia?

Sorokin: It’s astonishing. I can’t help but gain the impression that our champions of the freedom of opinion — writers, emigrants and civil rights activists — had only one goal in mind: the collapse of the Soviet Union, started by Alexander Solzhenitzyn. And now they are all silent.

SPIEGEL: How do you feel about the former chess world champion, Garry Kasparov, who is trying to build an opposition movement?

Sorokin: I have respect for him and other members of the opposition movement, like former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and (politician) Irina Khakamada. But these politicians do not exist for most people. About the only place you will find them is on the Internet. If a state-owned station were to report tomorrow that Kasyanov was visiting Russian cities and talking to the people, the manager of that station would be looking for a new job the next day.

SPIEGEL: What can be done?

Sorokin: It’s pointless to expect change to be ordered from above. The bureaucracy has grown such powerful roots, and corruption is so widespread, that these people have no interest in changing anything.

SPIEGEL: In other words, everything is hopeless?

Sorokin: Everyone must awaken the citizen within himself. The Russian philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev once said that Russia has many ideas and few goods. It was that way throughout the entire 20th century. Only in the last 15 years have the Russians managed to dress up and eat their fill. However, people with full bellies tend become drowsy. This explains, for example, the disinterest among students. In no other country are they as apathetic as they are here.

SPIEGEL: With so much pessimism, do you even like your fellow Russian people?

Sorokin: The word “people” is unpleasant to me. The phrase “Soviet people” was drummed into us from childhood on. I love concrete people, enlightened people who live conscious lives and do not simply sit there and vegetate. To love the people you have to be the general secretary of the Communist Party or an absolute dictator. The poet Josef Brodsky once said: The trees are more important to me than the forest.

SPIEGEL: In your book you describe a wall with which Russia isolates itself from the West. Why is this wall built?

Sorokin: After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, former party officials burned their party books and traded in their black Volga limousines for black German-made sedans. That was it. We had no purifying revolution. Neither Communist Party officials nor KGB generals were forced to give up the reins of power. In August 1991, I was in the crowd standing in front of the Lubyanka KGB building when the monument to KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky was toppled. It seemed as if a new era was about to begin. But we underestimated the power of the Soviet Union. It became ingrained in people’s consciousness over the course of seven decades. After German reunification, West Germany became a mirror for former East German citizens. We didn’t have that.

SPIEGEL: You hold a degree in petroleum engineering. Was the latest confrontation with Belarus over natural gas and oil an expression of Moscow’s power politics?

Sorokin: Our government hasn’t become accustomed to the fact yet that Georgia, Azerbaijan, the Baltic states — in fact, the entire former Soviet Union — are now independent countries. Incidentally, I wrote my thesis on the development of dampers for oil pipelines.

SPIEGEL: Did this expertise come in handy in your book?

Sorokin: Yes, there is a sentence in it that reads: “We shut the damper, as the czar ordered.”

SPIEGEL: How should German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, behave in dealing with the Russian government?

Sorokin: The West should be even more vocal in insisting that the Russians respect human rights. All compromise aside, I ask myself whether Russia is moving in the direction of democracy. I don’t believe it is! Bit by bit, Russia is slipping back into an authoritarian empire. The worst thing that can happen to us is indifference in the West — that is, if it were interested in nothing but oil and gas. I am always surprised when I watch the weather report on German television. First they show the map of Europe and then the camera moves to the right. Then comes Kiev, then Moscow and then everything stops. This seems to be the West’s view of us — of a wild Russia that begins past Moscow, a place one prefers not to see. This is a big mistake. The West must pay closer attention.

SPIEGEL: Does the West understand Russia?

Sorokin: Yes and no. In Russia no one is surprised when an official accepts a bribe while at the same time portraying the state as some sacred entity to which the bourgeois should pay homage. This all sounds absurd to you. But for Russians it is completely normal.

SPIEGEL: There used to be a similar attitude toward the state in Germany. But that changed after the Nazi dictatorship. Nowadays the state plays a more modest role in society, just as it does in America.

Sorokin: That just happens to be democracy. The Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov once said: In a Democracy, portraits of a nation’s leader should never exceed the size of a postage stamp. That won’t happen so quickly in our country.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Sorokin, we thank you for this interview.

Thanks for reading La Russophobe !