October 23, 2009 — Contents

FRIDAY OCTOBER 23 CONTENTS

(1)  EDITORIAL:  The End of Russian Energy Terrorism

(2)  EDITORIAL:  Vladimir “Commie” Putin

(3)  Annals of Russian Elections Fraud

(4)  Russia’s Collapsing Cities

(5)  Babitsky on Chechnya

EDITORIAL: The End of Russian Energy Terrorism

EDITORIAL

The End of Russian Energy Terrorism

For too long now, the Putin regime has been terrorizing Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the West with energy warfare, little different from what Al Qaeda does with bombs.  At last, though, the tide seems to be turning on this pathetic last-ditch effort of the Russian Kremlin to once again dominate the globe.

EDITORIAL: Vladimir “Just Call me Commie!” Putin

EDITORIAL

Vladimir “Just Call me Commie!” Putin

Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed.

The New York Times, October 17th

You read that right:  Proud KGB spy Vladimir Putin is openly proclaiming his desire to copy the governing strategies of the Chinese Communist Party.  Meanwhile, ex-Commie bigwig Mikhail Gorbachev was scathingly condemning what he called a “mockery” of democracy in Russia’s most recent elections, which were a travesty even by Russia’s barbaric standards as we report below.  Russia has sunk about as low is it can get.

How many people were there, we wonder, those Russopile bastards, telling us when Putin came to power that Russia could “never go back” to the dark days of Communism and totalitarian, one-party dictatorship, that it did not matter that Putin was a proud KGB spy  because he had seen the light of Soviet failure and would not repeat those errors.  They were, of course, lying to us, seeking to buy time for Putin to consolidate the very type of government they denied he was capable of building.

It’s hard to imagine a more emphatic declaration of Putin’s failure than that he wants to study the Chinese, that is unless you want to talk about giant French retailer Carrefour.

Annals of Russian Election Fraud

The Power Vertical reports on the details of the latest shameful electoral fraud, as exposed heroically by a group of Russian bloggers:

After the December 2007 Duma elections and March 2008 presidential election (hello, Dmitry Medvedev!), some intrepid Russian bloggers and independent election observers performed some heroic work to highlight the extent of the election fraud in Russia. I wrote about their work here, paying particular attention to some meticulous statistical analysis that was done. If you want the full story, get a copy of “The Forensics Of Election Fraud: Russia And Ukraine” by U.S.-based professors Mikhail Maygkov and Peter Ordeshook and Dmitry Shakin of Moscow’s Academy of National Economy.

Now Russia’s bloggers are at it again, putting the microscope to the official results of the October 11 Moscow City Duma elections, in which, according to official results United Russia won 66 percent of the vote and 32 of the 35 council seats. That’s right, under the grossly unfair seat-allocation system that they instituted before the vote, 66 percent of the vote translates into 91 percent of the seats. Official turnout in Moscow was put at about 35 percent.

Russia’s Collapsing Cities

Leon Aron

Leon Aron of the American Enterprise Institute, writing in the New York Times, details the horrifying collapse of Russian cities from within:

Viewed from the outside, things have been going quite well for Russia recently. The United States has scrapped, at least for now, the plan to base missile defense sites in Poland and the Czech Republic. Germany and Russia seem to have overcome opposition in Europe to their Nord Stream pipeline, despite fears that it will solidify Russia’s dominance of the European natural gas supplies. Oil prices have recovered from the disastrously low — for Russia — levels of last winter. And, far from buckling under pressure from the United States over sanctions against Iran, Russian leaders felt confident enough to concede almost nothing to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her visit to Moscow this week.

Yet on the inside the country remains dangerously close to a serious breakdown of authority. In addition to the Muslim North Caucasus, which is already barely governable, the most vulnerable places are the company towns, which could catalyze a nationwide explosion of political turmoil.

Babitsky on Chechnya

Andrei Babitsky

David McDuff says this is Andrei Babitsky writing under a Georgian pseudonym for Prague Watchdog:

Andrei Soldatov’s recent article in Yezhednevny Zhurnal [about Moscow’s alleged ceding of control of the counter-terrorist operation to Ramzan Kadyrov, see the link (tr.)] left me with mixed feelings. I do not consider myself too proficient a judge of the control structures of the security agencies in Chechnya, and am therefore always interested to read what the experts have to say on this subject. Soldatov is without any doubt a highly informed specialist in this field, so anything written by him is likely to help one towards a better understanding of what is taking place in the republic. However, it seems to me that in the conclusions it makes his article repeats the stereotypical fears that are characteristic of Russia’s liberal community.

Let me explain what I mean.