Russia

Friday

Alex Massie

Yes, Pussy Riot were – and are – right – Spectator Blogs

From our UK edition

One of the happiest things about writing for the Spectator is that there is no editorial line. Indeed the editor is always pleased by an intra-mural rammy. So there's this: Dennis Sewell's argument that Pussy Riot, the only all-girl Russian punk band you're likely to have heard of, have been asking for trouble and deserve some of the trouble they're receiving is the lamest sort of counter-intuitive, concern-trolling journalism. It helps pay the bills, mind you, so there's that too.

The Spectator

Why Pussy Riot were wrong

From our UK edition

The three members of Pussy Riot have been sentenced to two years each in prison today for hooliganism after performing a 'punk prayer' protesting against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's main cathedral. The sentencing has been denounced as disproportionate and the charges as trumped up, but in last week's issue of the Spectator, Dennis Sewell asked whether the western media had forgotten that what the band did was still wrong. Sewell first explained that the trio's treatment by the Russian legal system was indeed unfair: In case you’re still in doubt about my position, let me remove every scintilla of ambiguity. What has been done to the trio was wrong, wrong and viciously wrong.

Thursday

Matthew Teller

Why a rough guide is better than none

From our UK edition

Like the most desperate of priests, and the most marginal of activists, Nick Cohen wants us all to be like him. He’s an angry journalist who can’t imagine why everyone doesn’t think like an angry journalist. In What lonely planet are they on? Cohen attempts a take-down of travel guide publisher Lonely Planet, implying that they’re all liberal lefties, happy to whitewash the crimes of dictators in order to sell more books. To do so he cites the work of Thomas Kohnstamm, a Lonely Planet author who admits making stuff up (though, here and elsewhere, Kohnstamm maintains that the job he was commissioned for was a desk-edit, rather than a research trip).

Monday

Steerpike

Judo diplomacy

From our UK edition

While the ladies' beach volleyball is exciting Boris ‘glistening otters’ Johnson and the peeking Prime Minister, another event could be about to get very political. President Putin is set to arrive in town on Thursday: yes there will be bilateral meetings, but he’s really here for the judo. At a time when UK/Russian relations are particularly low, one Russian Embassy source jokes that perhaps diplomacy should be a little more hands on and that Putin should challenge fellow judo fan William Hague to a match. Sadly this will remain a pipe-dream, which is just as well - we would not want Hague’s old judo partner - Lord Sebastian Coe - to get jealous.

Saturday

David Blackburn

UN observers enter Mazraat al-Qubeir

From our UK edition

Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said that ‘some foreign players’ are provoking opposition to the Assad regime while ‘demanding the international community take decisive steps to change the regime’. He also reiterated that Russia ‘will never agree to the use of force in the UN Security Council’, which would seem to impede Lord Owen’s plan that the West, led by the Turkish military, can intervene in Syria with Russia’s blessing. Meanwhile, UN observers recently entered Mazraat al-Quberir, scene of an alleged massacre of villagers. Journalists accompanying the observers report that there is evidence of killing (remnants of burnt flesh and bloodied clothing), but any bodies have been removed.

Saturday

Richard Davenporthines

Hero or villein?

From our UK edition

‘Not one word’, exclaimed Turgenev of Tolstoy, ‘not one movement of his is natural! He is eternally posing before us!’ The recurrent underlying theme of A.N. Wilson’s prize-winning biography of Tolstoy, now re-issued after a quarter of a century, is the novelist as grand impersonator. Wilson (a prolific novelist himself) believes that there is a strong impulse in novelists to don masks or test alter egos, and that this impulse rioted in Tolstoy’s character. Throughout his long life Tolstoy switched between playing at sad orphan, landowner, libertine, crazed gambler, spiritual elder, holy fool, paterfamilias, historian, village idiot, cobbler and dissident.

Saturday

Robert Chandler

Searching for a saviour

From our UK edition

The central themes of Russian history have remained constant for over a millennium.  Russia’s vast spaces and lack of any natural borders have always made her inhabitants terrified of invasion. And to protect the country against invaders, and to preserve its unity, Russia’s rulers seem always to have felt it necessary to assert their authority with great brutality. All this is at least hinted at in the very first introduction to Russian history. The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev around 1113, tells us that there was no law among [the Slavs], but tribe rose against tribe…  Accordingly they …  said to the people of Rus [who were probably Scandinavians]: ‘Our whole land is great and rich, but there is no order in it.

Saturday

Masha Karp

Siege mentality

From our UK edition

The mirrored sunglasses worn by Putin on the cover of Angus Roxburgh’s The Strongman give the Russian president the look of a crude mafia boss, while the half-face photo on the cover of Masha Gessen’s book makes him appear both more ordinary and more sinister. This hints at the difference of the authors’ approach. Gessen focuses on the trajectory of a postwar Soviet boy growing up in a shabby communal flat, fierce and vengeful in street fights, who dreams of joining the KGB. This dream was fulfilled: Putin got a boring job as an agent in East Germany, and ten years after returning home he surprisingly became the most powerful man in Russia — which, 12 years later, he remains. His years in the KGB taught him secrecy.

Thursday

Freddy Gray

McCain’s on the warpath (again)

From our UK edition

Senator John McCain was on the radio again this morning, urging us to intervene on behalf of Syria's rebels. ‘It's not a fair fight,’ he said, as if that were a good reason to wade in. McCain, a former prisoner of war, is to humanitarian intervention what Mother Teresa was to helping the sick. He never misses a chance to promote a good scrap in the name of freedom and democracy. He cheered on western involvement in the wars in Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In McCain's worldview, there is no conflict or international problem which cannot be solved by the application of American military power. When running for president in 2008, he made war-mongering noises towards Russia in defence of Georgia over South Ossetia.

Peter Hoskin

Defecting to what?

From our UK edition

The wires are ablaze with the news that Syria's deputy oil minister, Abdo Hussameldin, has switched sides to the country's opposition. His is, after all, the most high-ranking defection so far, and he doesn't have any kind words for his former employers. As he puts it in a video that has been posted on YouTube, the current regime are ‘not friends of the Syrian people but partners in the killing of the Syrian people’. We shouldn't, however, get too excited just yet. This could be a significant moment, not least because it suggests that Assad's hold over his own government is beginning to weaken. But it's also worth remembering that Hussameldin is only one of dozens of deputy ministers in Syria.

Sunday

Peter Hoskin

Putin’s dilemma

From our UK edition

If you enjoy scoring tiny but likely returns on your wagers, then how about putting some money down on Vladimir Putin to win today's presidential election in Russia? William Hill are currently offering odds of 1/100, if you're interested. Like John Simpson, writing for this week's Spectator, they regard this as ‘Russia’s Coronation Day’. A near cert. The rest of Simpson's article is worth reading, but it's his conclusion that we'll pull out here. Putin, he says, will ‘walk it in the first round’ today, but his medium-term future looks far less secure: ‘Russia is changing. It can’t simply be told to shut up any more.

Thursday

Jonathan Jones

Gorby: Putin’s like Thatcher

From our UK edition

The Times has a fascinating interview (£) with former Soviet leader, Nobel Laureate and two-time Man of the Year Mikhail Gorbachev. He strikes an optimistic tone about the future of democracy in Russia, praising the ‘Moscow Spring’ protesters and saying ‘This is the right moment to start creating as part of this new situation a strong democratic party.’ But perhaps the most eye-catching comes when he compares Vladimir Putin with Margaret Thatcher: ‘Mr Gorbachev recalled Mrs Thatcher, Prime Minister at the time, telling him that she was leaving a summit in Paris early to deal with the challenge to her leadership from within the Conservative Party.

Monday

Daniel Korski

Putin’s end

From our UK edition

This weekend, thousands of people defied the cold and the control in Moscow to show their dislike for Vladimir Putin and what Russia has become under his leadership: corrupt, energy-reliant, centralised, and uncompetitive. It is now a country that must win externally because it can't help but lose internally. ‘Post-BRIC’, as a new report has it. My guess is that Putin will ‘win’ the presidential election, and will ensure that a sufficient number of counter-protests make it look as if he has more support than he actually has. That's exactly the kind of ‘virtual politics’ that Moscow excels at and which Ukraine expert Andrew Wilson has described so well in a book on the subject.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

What didn’t happen in 2011

From our UK edition

In the run-up to every New Year, newspapers and the blogosphere are full of articles about what happened in the year just gone. 2011 was a particularly eventful year so there will be much to pick from. But what about the things that did not happen, though they were widely expected? Here are five things that did not take place — though, as the year unfolded, many people would have bet on their occurrence: 1) Algeria's revolution. As one North African dictator after another fell to pro-democracy protesters, everyone expected Algeria to be next. But it wasn't.

Peter Hoskin

Russia looms significant across 2012

From our UK edition

The Christmas weekend was, I'm sure you noticed, rich with political incident. And yet, from continued turbulence in the Middle East to continued turbulence in Chris Huhne's career, few things stood out as much as the protests against Vladimir Putin in Russia. They were, by most reasonable estimates, the largest in that country since the fall of the Soviet Union. And they add to the wave of disgruntlement that has been swelling since even before this month's disputed parliamentary elections. The wave, of course, hasn't broken yet. But few seem sure about how far it will travel and how much change it will wreak.

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

Russia’s Tahrir?

From our UK edition

Just a couple of days after Vladimir Putin's electoral setback, Russian police have arrested a number of protesters, including veteran liberal politician Boris Nemtsov and the popular blogger Alexei Navalny. This is the umpteenth time that Nemtsov, the former deputy prime minister of Russia, has been manhandled by the Russian state. He also spent some time in jail at the beginning of 2011 and was subjected to strenuous treatment. But, it is unusual for Navalny to have been pulled in. He is an activist who's gained prominence among Russian bloggers and reformers. He is not "Russia's Erin Brockovich", as hailed by Time Magazine, and many of his recent remarks contain more than a dollop of Russian xenophobia.

Monday

Daniel Korski

Behold post-Putin Russia

From our UK edition

Sunday's parliamentary elections in Russia marked the beginning of the end of the Putin era. It won't feel like it for another few years, as the Russian strongman ascends to the nation's Presidency again and bestrides the international stage. But when future historians come to examine post-Putin Russia, the end of 2011 will be seen as the point at which the transition began. Exit polls showed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party with less than 50 per cent of the vote. United Russia held a two-thirds majority in the outgoing State Duma.

Sunday

David Blackburn

Putin’s party takes a hit

From our UK edition

Vladimir Putin’s party has taken a hit in Russia’s parliamentary elections. Reuters reports that the United Russia party took 48.5 per cent of the votes, down from 64 per cent in 2007. These results are far from reliable: the BBC reports Russia’s independent election monitoring group has already recorded more than 5,300 complaints of malpractice. But television pundits have been keen to present this election as a referendum on the Russian prime minister, as he paves his way back to the Kremlin. Whatever the precise result, though, the early picture suggests that Putin’s subversive opponents – described by Pavel Stroilov in these pages earlier in the year – have weathered persecution to knock the Muscle Man.

Thursday

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Tsar Putin III defines himself

From our UK edition

Vladimir Putin, in the manner of a modern day Tsar, has launched a series of initiatives to mark his march back to the Kremlin. His most eye-catching proposal is to form a Eurasian Union, a Moscow-controlled EU for the post-Soviet space. Writing in Today’s Times (£), Russia’s strongman explains the benefits: a union would aid greater economic integration in the region and it would place a regional bloc on the other side of the negotiating table from the European Union. But, what are Putin’s real aims, beyond laying out an agenda for his presidential term? Steps could be taken to integrate the post-Soviet region; but, without domestic reforms in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and so on, the benefits of further economic integration will probably be minor.