Eat your heart out, Rodina

There was a lot of talk in 2005 about migrant workers and the "problem" of immigration in Russia in general. Much of the talk was stirred up by politicians practicing thinly veiled racism.

Meanwhile, as Moscow prepared to greet 2006, and Muscovites rushed around buying their last presents and final items for the holiday table, or stumbled around already in a holiday stupor, holiday flags were being raised downtown by a couple of the non-Russians who keep the city functioning.


Tverskaya, near the Museum of Contemporary History, December 31, 3:02pm.


Pushkin Square, the corner of Tverskaya and Bolshaya Bronnaya, December 31, 2:52pm.

Happy New Year!

Poor Yuri Dolgoruky - no one asked him if he wanted to be dressed up as Santa Claus this year. Mayor Luzhkov said it was to be so, and it was so. Note that he's dressed as Santa, not in the traditional blue of Ded Moroz.

Street shoes in SPB

How could I resist a scene containing a barbershop sign, peeling paint, obscene graffiti, a sneering old woman (who, admittedly, entered the shot unexpectedly), and discarded ladies' boots? You'll have to take my word that I didn't position the boots - their previous owner must have wanted them to find a good home, and they were in fact no longer there when we walked by the same spot later on in the day (Dec 23).


More abandoned footwear - this time of the children's variety - near Turgenev Square, at 9am on the morning of December 26. I do realize that after my previous post singing the virtues of SPB as a city that's photogenic even without its inhabitants, I'm posting two pictures which prominently feature those inhabitants. What can I say, Russia is full of contradictions, and I'm just trying to follow suit.

The shots not taken

We were up in St. Petersburg over the Christmas weekend and had a wonderful time. I woke up early nearly every morning we were there (the remnants of jet lag) and wandered around in the snow, taking pictures of the streets. Somehow St. Petersburg is beautiful all by itself, with or without its inhabitants creating more interesting photographs. Moscow, on the other hand, is not so photogenic - I find that the Moscow photos I'm happiest with generally involve people or their ephemeral traces - graffiti, litter, construction scaffolding - rather than permanent-seeming, stately buildings.

Be that as it may, I wanted to briefly mention a few things I didn't photograph while I was in SPB:

1) A lovely, two-storey-tall Christmas tree, in the garden of what I think is the Yusupov Palace right next to the sledding hill which I remember from 20 years ago and which is still in intensive use. This emblem of holiday cheer left no doubt as to its sponsor - the large, four-pointed star on its top bore the Gazprom logo and was colored in the company's signature blue.

2) The venerable Bukinist store on Liteiny Prospekt, which is now sadly shut down, the door padlocked and the shelves empty. One feature of the interior which I never fully appreciated before is the kitschy "Staraya Kniga" mural on one of the walls. No doubt that will be lost to history when the prime retail space is turned over to a more profitable tenant.

3) An anti-G-8 stencil identical to the one in the photo above but on the wall of a building located at the busy intersection of Nevsky and Liteiny. The shot would have included a Nevsky Prospekt address placard, the stencil, and a traffic policeman using one of those built-in control boxes to regulate the stoplights. As you might imagine, it was the presence of the cop that gave me second thoughts about taking the picture.

Welcome home?

Moscow greeted me yesterday with a slightly renovated passport control area at Sheremetyevo and a snow flurry.

Right away, I noticed some things which have changed since I was last here in August. For one thing, there seems to be a new license plate designation for Moscow. In Russia, the region of a car's registration is indicated by a 2-digit number set off to the side from the license number - Moscow's had been 99, 77, and 97, but yesterday I saw a new one - 177. So they're breaking the rules by adding a digit; I guess there are just too many cars in this town to stick with the old numbers. This comes on the heels of the change to Moscow's area code - from 095 to 495.

The new hotel being built on the site of the old Inturist at the foot of Tverskaya is going up quickly, and across the street sushi restaurant Gin-no Taki has opened a new third-floor dining room, alleviating the lines which always used to make it difficult to dine there. The prime real estate near Pushkin Square from which Trinity Motors was unceremoniously ejected earlier this year has now become - what else - a mobile phone store, done up in a hideous shade of pink, no less. All along Tverskaya between Mayakovskaya and Belorusskaya there seem to be new banks and other businesses, although that's an area that's always had a lot of turnover. Downtown I noticed street advertising for the new televised version of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita - the new Russia taking the protest literature (though M&M is, of course, much more than just protest literature) of the old and making it commercially viable.

And this morning we woke up to see that yesterday's snow flurry had been but a precursor to an all-night snowfall. The streetlights reflecting off the new-fallen snow created a pre-dawn light that's beautiful to the city-dweller in the same way as moonlight is to denizens of more rural areas. I heard from a cabbie yesterday that a metel' (a blizzard with drifting snow) was forecast for today, and I'm glad to see that it looks like the forecasters were right for once.

The photo shows the early stages of morning traffic (around 8 am) on a snowy - but never snowbound - Leningradsky Prospekt. Moscow maintains its ability to operate regardless of the elements thanks to convoys of snowplows and salt trucks like the one in the photo at bottom right. In the background you can see the illuminated spire of the gargantuan Triumph-Palace apartment building, shining through the snow.

If you're looking for a few things to read, I recommend Sean Guillory's recent bit on the Moscow metro - one of my favorite parts of this city - and this Moscow Times article which Sean mentions; also worth checking out is the homepage of one of our favorite sources of Christmas presents; and, for those of you who are more financially inclined, the Russian Stock Market Blog.

I'm sure I'll notice lots of other changes in the coming days in Moscow. I'm hoping that it keeps snowing - it feels like the city's putting on its best winter face. It's good to be back.

End of the Line #7 - Красногвардейская

The southern end of the green Zamoskvoretskaia line - Krasnogvardeiskaia.

This station is named after the Krasnaia Gvardiia - the Red Guard. All these photos are from April 23 of this year.


On the station platform.


Unattractive, Revolution-themed artwork - the slogan at the bottom of the composition is "Workers of the world, unite."


Slot-machine hall (at left) next to a bread store and currency exchange.


Slot-machine hall (at right) next to a mobile phone store.


Two slot-machine halls next to each other, with a gold and antiques appraiser sandwiched in between.


Sloppily photocopied "wanted" poster announcing that police are seeking one Ruslan Rakhmanovich Ibragimov in connection with the February 2005 bombing in the Moscow metro. The sketch artist made the wanted man look a little like a skinnier version of Prosecutor-General Vladimir Ustinov.


Residential buildings near the metro before nightfall...


...and after. Everything looks better at night.


Graffiti in the elevator, which says, "Limita*, don't piss in the elevator!"

*A pejorative word derived from the Soviet-era concept of "limitchiki," people who would come into Moscow to acquire groceries and consumer goods which were not available in the provinces. It's now applied to people who are recently arrived in Moscow, are looked down on by native Muscovites, and often don't have proper documentation to live in the capital, whose lives inspired a movie of the same name.

Memories from last winter

December 26, 2004, at the Izmailovo market.

We had been out in the cold shopping for Christmas presents for hours and decided to get some shashlyk to warm up.

Laughing all the way to the bank?

This photo shows good friends Vladimir Putin and Gerhard Schroeder sharing a light moment in Kaliningrad last July. But what were they really laughing about?

Gerhard: The opposition actually thinks I want to win this election! Remind me again how much you're going to pay me once I'm done with this politics crap?

Volodya: Hah! The opposition! They are always such lokhi*. That's why I don't even bother having an opposition. Just be glad your money will be coming directly to you. Sechin keeps telling me mine's in Switzerland somewhere...

*chumps, suckers.

The "revolving door," Russo-German-style

In the US political context, the concept of the "revolving door" refers to the practice of elected government officials and bureaucrats leaving public service and immediately going to work for a lobbying firm or a private-sector company with activities somehow related to their prior official role. The instances of this happening in the US at the federal and state levels of government are numerous, in spite of the "cooling-off period" guidelines that exist for some officials and require them to wait some period of time after their government service before doing this.

Likewise, private-sector top managers who are politically well-connected often receive appointments to work in government departments which regulate or otherwise deal with the industry in which they have made their careers. Hence, the "revolving door" metaphor, which also implies that it's the same people coming and going, a dynamic promoted by the two-party system in the US. If you're an expert on topic X and are affiliated with the Democratic Party, for example, right now you're probably working (if not on the staff of a Democratic Member of Congress) at a think tank or, if your area of expertise is in demand in the private sector, with a corporation. And when the party in power eventually changes (thank goodness it always has in this country, at least in the past), you will be in line to be appointed to an appropriate government department. The most frequently cited example of this is Dick Cheney, who was Secretary of Defense in the first Bush Administration, went to work for the defense contractor Halliburton while Clinton was in the White House, and then essentially nominated himself to be W's running mate.

In some cases, it makes sense - the individual was an official dealing with some technical field and is qualified to consult on the same issues for a private-sector company, or, in the case of a legislator, the individual's legislative activities corresponded with their areas of interest and they want to continue to work on the same issues after they leave office because they are not re-elected or are not eligible to be re-elected (because of term limits). By the same token, it is easy to see why the government might in some cases want to hire experts in certain fields from the private sector.

Often, however, ex-government officials and legislators are hired on the basis of who they know rather than what they know, and they are expected to use their connections in government in the service of their new employer's (or their new employer's clients') economic interests. And individuals moving from the private sector into government service sometimes have opportinuties to influence their former employers' business which look very much like a conflict of interest.

Perhaps there isn't anything inherently wrong even with this, but in general the process tends to have an unsavory air about it and is often decried by media commentators (see the next-to-last paragraph of the second piece linked). At its most egregious, the "revolving door" involves jobs being promised to public officials while they are still in office (although this is, at least in some cases, illegal), with at least an implication that before leaving office they need to perform some sort of favor for the company that intends to hire them. It seems that nowadays, the potential opportunity to "cash in" on one's public service is viewed almost as an entitlement by a growing number of so-called "public servants." But perhaps this has always been the nature of the game in Washington. [LA: Think this is enough background? --Editor: I thought this was supposed to be about Russia - ?]

In any event, money does make the world go round, and former officials do need to make a living doing something, so these incestuous relationships are more or less an accepted practice in the US. The Washington Post, for example, even titles its periodic updates on people's comings and goings to and from various jobs "Revolving Door."

Being a native of Washington and therefore accustomed to such behavior, I wasn't surprised to hear that Gerhard Schroeder has taken a position with the new Gazprom-controlled North European gas pipeline - a massive infrastructure project with important geopolitical implications for Russia to which Schroeder and his good friend Vladimir committed their countries just over 3 months ago. I guess this just goes to show that when the Russians and the Germans collaborate - instead of going to war with each other, which was more commonly the case in the 20th century - they can accomplish remarkable feats. Through cooperation, Schroeder and Putin, with the help of Putin's underlings colleagues at state-controlled Gazprom, have managed to achieve a revolving-door scenario that is so laden with retrospective conflict of interest concerns and potentially so scandalous that it puts to shame just about anything you would ever see in Washington.

I heard about this story first on the BBC's World Today news program, which is broadcast after midnight by our local public radio station in DC. At 12:30am, the same station broadcasts Deutsche Welle's Newslink. Not surprisingly, DW didn't have a word to say about this story.

Davids Medienkritik caught the scent of this story quickly - it does smell rather bad - and his post on this has some initial reactions and discussion in the comments. The Times of London doesn't like the way this looks, either:

The move was announced yesterday by Alexei Miller, the Gazprom chairman, as he opened a new Russian-German gas pipeline, but has yet to be confirmed by Herr Schröder.

His reticence is understandable. Gazprom’s pressure on East European states has been growing and the EU is becoming deeply dependent on the company’s gas supplies.

The management of Gazprom is very close to Mr Putin, whom the former Chancellor befriended during his seven years in office.

Herr Schröder, 61, is determined to boost his pension with business contracts. He is already signed up as a consultant to Ringier, a Swiss company. Reports suggest that he will earn about £300,000 a year from them, but the Gazprom position is likely to pay more.

Really, though, who can live on a mere $500+k a year nowadays?

And the Financial Times quotes an anti-corruption activist:

Hansjörg Elshorst, head of the German section of the Transparency International corruption lobby group, said: “Is Schröder giving his elder-statesman backing because he believes in the political significance of the venture? Or is he being rewarded for supporting the deal earlier? The latter would be unacceptable, but either way he has to come forward and explain.”

Reuters reported the following on November 18:

Shortly after he lost the September 18 election, there were reports from Moscow that the chancellor, who is a good friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin, would become an adviser to Russian gas giant Gazprom. The stories were quickly denied.

Just as in DC, denials - especially hasty ones - don't always mean the story's not true. It looks like for this massive pipeline project an equally massive conflict-of-interest scandal may become a part of the deal that no one bargained for. Or perhaps this is just business as usual anywhere in the world, and no one will raise a fuss.

Proto-blogger

Before there was SiberianLight (R.I.P.), and long before there was Scraps of Moscow, there was Belly Button Window. This is a blog by an American who travels a fair bit these days, judging from the recent posts - more to the point, he lived and worked in Russia for several years surrounding the financial crisis of '98. Thanks to the miracle of Movable Type, you can check out his first impressions of Russia in 1997 as a Peace Corps Volunteer and his subsequent life and times (apparently as an office worker in the professional services field with an accounting firm) in 1997, '98, and '99. It's not clear whether he actually had all of this on-line back then or uploaded a diary of some kind, interspersed with timely press clippings. But the flavor of pre- and immediately-post-crisis Moscow is unmistakable.

I can't say I read everything - the guy's awfully prolific - but my favorite of the posts I did see was this one (about a topic I just can't avoid) aggregating some news coverage around Alla Pugacheva's 50th birthday back in '98 (though he back-dated it in '97 for some reason). He also has posts like this one about fixtures of Moscow expat life like the Starlite Diner, about what it was like to be an expat back in the day, and about some things that never seem to change. Oh, and some observations from his time in Ukraine in 1999. Fascinating, really, like a trip back in time to a bygone era. I spent a small bit of time in Moscow myself in 1997 and 1998, and it's strange to compare that Moscow to the Moscow I came to know in 2001-05.

Rahat Lukum (Lokum?)

On a lighter note, there was a delightful article by Liesl Schillinger* in Slate today exploring one of the great mysteries of the confectionary world - what is so delightful about Turkish Delight? This is actually very season-appropriate, methinks, since it's soon to be the time of year when vacationing Russians wing their way to Turkey in droves (OK, maybe they actually go to Egypt over New Year's and Turkey for the May holidays, because the Med Sea is too cold right now, but work with me here, please) on clapped-out, Soviet-made airliners that are cheap to charter because they aren't allowed to fly into Western Europe anymore. In addition to the other things Russians being back from Turkey - first-degree sunburns, cheaply made "water tobacco pipes," and the odd STD (I can't help but remember the ads for an STD clinic that used to run incessantly on Echo of Moscow around vacation season) - they bring home with them boxes upon boxes of unwanted "Delight."

[Wistfully] Ah, I recall our first (in fact only, so far) trip to Turkey back in 2000 like it was yesterday - 'twas a honeymoon, of sorts, albeit one that preceded the wedding - when we, too, were charmed by the salesmen and dearth of other gift options into bringing back several boxes of the stuff to give to friends and family. Perhaps some of them enjoyed it, but I've always more or less shared the opinion expressed in the abovementioned Slate article: "It tasted like soap rolled in plaster dust, or like a lump of Renuzit air freshener: The texture was both waxy and filling-looseningly chewy." It's not that it's totally inedible, just that it's not a particularly rewarding experience, especially for something that is doubtless not light on the calories. Anyway, the article is about how the book (and movie) The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe build up Delight as though it's a delight, and about why that might be the case. Very interesting - you wouldn't imagine the topic could turn to sugar rationing in post-war Britain, but it does. Highly recommended.

*She has also translated (from German) at least two short stories by the Russian emigre author Wladimer Kaminer (of Russian Disco fame) into English, which are available - yes, free and enjoyable content - here and here.

...in which the lens is turned on my own country, for a change.

While I was living in Moscow, this space was often filled with my frustrated observations - rants, even - on the state of the Russian media, Russian political elites' mentality, et cetera. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has taken but a few short months in the cocoon of hypocrisy that is Washington, DC, under the present administration for me to grow just as weary of the tone of many American commentators, not to mention the political elites, if they can even be called that.

The sentiment behind this post has been brewing for some time - as an American who has enjoyed poking fun at the Russian authorities' attempts to control the media in their own country, I realize that our own recently revealed attempts to free the nascent Iraqi press through payola don't do much for any American's credibility on such matters. And as someone who's been known to call attention to Russia's misconduct in - and of - the Chechen conflict, I don't exactly feel as though America has even a semblance of the moral authority we once enjoyed on issues of human rights and war crimes - even on an issue as basic and fundamental to America's national identity as what it means to promote freedom and democracy - anymore.

Not that this is an entirely new feeling - after all, the Bushies have been making America look bad for a couple of years now with policies both foreign and domestic, which was hard not to notice even from halfway around the world - but it's getting more and more pervasive.

Although may seem like a bit of a non sequitur, I was going to link next to an article by a pro-American news service talking in incredulous terms about Russia's latest move to cozy up to Iran - oh, hell, here's the link - which sort of set me off on the above train of thought. The author sounds surprised that Russia feels itself able to conduct a foreign policy consistent with its own vision of the world as opposed to one consistent with the (official) US view of the way things oughta be.

Although I was impervious to and unswayed by Russian indignation about such articles and attitudes while I was in Russia, being back in the capital of the sole superpower of what remains, for now, a unipolar world, and seeing once again the fruits of American provincialism cross-bred with a desire to project power around the world, I find it much easier to sympathize with the Russians' seemingly reflexive and sometimes misguided (though just as often shrewdly self-interested) desire to serve as a counterweight of some sorts to America in the world.

Good thing I'm going back to Russia for a visit in just 10 days - I guess I need to be reminded that the guys in charge over there have generally been much more successful in their media manipulation and silencing of dissenting political views than even the Bush-Cheney team, and there's nothing for that like a few nights of watching the Russian TV news. Then, just when I start feeling proud to be from the US again, I'll get to come back to Washington.

A note on sources*: A first-time visitor to this site might look at the articles linked in the post above - predominantly previous posts of mine with a few Slate articles mixed in - and conclude that I'm a self-absorbed, knee-jerk liberal, and perhaps a flag-burner, too. But that's not the case (although I guess you'll have to take my word for it). I'm just a simple guy who's nostalgic for the feeling of easy, righteous indignation generated by observing the Russian government's blunders up close and personal - and one who gets very uncomfortable when forced to observe my own government's similar shortcomings in such close quarters. Maybe this is why some expats never come home.

*in true academic tradition.

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OK, I'm glad I got that out of my system. Now I can get back to preparing for my last exam (next Monday) and, more importantly, forgetting about the one I took today. Our regularly scheduled programming will resume next week.

Spoofing the MSM*

Check out this piece in a recent eXile, poking fun at the "sky-is-falling" tone which the eXholes perceive in much recent mainstream Western journalism about Russia. Glad to see they are carrying on the proud tradition of deflating the Western journalistic establishment. Thanks to Konstantin for posting this.


*MSM = US blogger-speak for "mainstream media." Often, this acronym is employed by people who think the MSM are hiding some fundamental truths that only heroic bloggers can discover. I am not a subscriber to that point of view.

Proshchai, Rodina? I doubt it.

Dmitry Rogozin's Rodina party has been banned from the Moscow City Duma elections for running a truly offensive, racist TV ad - or, if you believe some commentators, for outgrowing their intended role as the Kremlin's "loyal opposition." Andy at SiberianLight has been covering developments in this story, which is an interesting one and could be providing a look at developments to come in Russian domestic politics in the next 5-10 years.

Ilya Yashin, the co-chair of the Yabloko party's youth wing and a candidate in tomorrow's elections, has an interesting forecast on his LiveJournal blog about what the outcome of the ban on Rodina might be in the next several years (it seems like a conspiracy theory, although it's hard to tell who Yashin is implying the conspirators to be), along with this caricature of Rogozin dressed up as a young fascist. Yabloko's official point of view on the removal of Rodina from the elections is as follows (my translation):

"...we believe that the removal of Rodina from the elections in response to Zhirinovsky's lawsuit has nothing whatsoever to do with the battle against the xenophobia of nationalism and does not serve the cause of eradicating fascism in Russia."

Rogozin - who, incidentally, shares a birthday with Iosif Stalin and Mikhail Saakashvili - has always seemed like a dangerously ambitious politician to me, the kind of guy who will do anything to get to the top and stay there. While there may be legitimate planks in Rodina's platform, I hope that Rogozin and his team understand what they seem to be doing - and how dangerous it is to loose the genie of ultra-nationalism onto the main stage of Russian politics.

Or maybe I'm taking this all too seriously, and the whole thing was an elaborately choreographed "PR-aktsiia," agreed upon ahead of time by all involved except the chumps who make up the general voting public, to set up Rodina as a target for the supposedly "anti-fascist" youth movement "Nashi." The fact that the LDPR clowns were apparently the ones to levy the charge of racism which got Rodina banned only makes one more suspicious that the whole thing is a puppet show, given LDPR's history of selling its political mouthpiece to the highest bidder. That's all just speculation, of course; on the other hand, maybe this is what "managed democracy" means to someone with a KGB background.

----------
More on Rodina (in case the links above are not enough reading material) - all in English:

Small factsheet from MosNews.
Interview with Rodina's "leading ideologue," Mikhail Delyagin - worth reading.
"Experts" at the Russia Profile website discuss what they're calling "Rodina-gate."
Blogger Veronica Khokhlova on Rodina.
Background on Rogozin's political career from RFE/RL.

More on a pop icon

I'll leave the serious stuff to Andy over at SiberianLight for the time being. Preparing exams has left me unable to concentrate (or at least to write about) any serious issues. I thus feel the need to add a bit more to my earlier comment about the fluffy topic of Russia's recent celebrity divorce scandal. I located an article on Pravda.ru written in happier times - on the tenth anniversary of the Kirkorov-Pugachova wedding. It talks about how the mayor of St. Petersburg at the time of their wedding, the late Anatoly Sobchak (or "Sabchak," as his name appears in the article), encouraged the pair to tie the knot in the northern capital. Note that this was in 1994, (I think) before the addition of young Volodya Putin to Sobchak's team. If VVP had been around, maybe this farce could have been avoided, but then what would the Russian tabloids have written about all these years?

And another random article has a very good explanation, for foreigners, of "Alla Pugacheva's Everlastimg [sic] Magic." The best comparison I can think of to someone in the US context would be Elvis Presley, who was, like Pugachova, once young and attractive and then grew bloated and overblown, with crazy on-stage outfits, etc. I've heard people say about both Elvis and Alla Borisovna that they both had tremendous stage presence in live shows at all stages of their careers, so maybe the comparison is a good one. I guess we can wish Pugachova better luck in dealing with the twilight of her stardom than Elvis had.

The more things change...

I picked a random book off my shelf to take a break from law school reading, and this is what I saw on the first page I turned to:

Moscow... A strange city, entirely unlike any European capital. America growing through the ancient walls of the Kremlin, the geometrical Lenin mausoleum next to the multi-colored Asiatic Saint Basil, a moth-eaten droshky next to the newest Hispano-Suiza, both stopping at the command of a policeman's white stick, the policeman wearing European white gloves and having an obviously Mongolian face with high cheekbones and narrow eyes; large shop windows displaying caviar and sturgeon and on the opposite side of the street a long queue of people waiting to buy herring or grain...

From Evgeny Zamyatin's lecture, "The Modern Russian Theater."
Originally delivered in Prague on December 20, 1931.

Happily, Andy is back and blogging. This makes me feel better about dropping out of sight for another couple of weeks in order to dispense with exams, and drop out of sight I must. But Andy has a handle on most of the stories I would be covering anyway, so check out SiberianLight for your fix.

High Culture

Viktor Pelevin has a new book out - The Helmet of Horror. The Moscow Times' Context section has this to say about Pelevin's notoriety outside of Russia:

For two reasons, it is disturbing to think that Western readers may regard Pelevin as Russia's most representative writer. First, Pelevin does not readily distinguish between things as they are and his arcane elaborations. A naive reader may confuse his phantasmagoric ravings for true descriptions of Russian reality; this reader will never talk to any Russian again without a burning desire to run for his life. Second, Pelevin might actually be Russia's most representative writer.

"Sovietization by Stealth"

I'm catching up on my Moscow Times opinion page reading... Here's a great column from October 4:

"Sovietization by Stealth," by Konstantin Sonin
Moscow Times, October 4, 2005, page 10

[...] The question of what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union now gives rise to heated debates only among professional political scientists. But the question is not as academic as it might seem at first glance. To understand why, consider a purely economic event that took place last week -- Gazprom's acquisition of Sibneft.

Your assessment of the Sibneft deal -- as well as of state-owned Rosneft's acquisition of Yuganskneftegaz, state-owned Unified Energy Systems' planned purchase of a large stake in Power Machines and the possible acquisition of Norilsk Nickel by state-owned diamond giant Alrosa -- will depend to a large extent on how you explain the downfall of the Soviet Union. If spies, Star Wars and geopolitical forces were to blame, then everything's fine.

But if the main reason for the collapse was economic, then we're in trouble, because this means that we're expending our own money and effort to rebuild the very same Soviet system of industrial organization and management whose ineffectiveness, so obvious in the final decades of the Soviet era, led to such regrettable consequences.

If this is the case, all the government's talk about economic stimulus, private property and transparency that economists love so much is pure nonsense. In effect, this means that the old Soviet-era Oil Industry Ministry, Nonferrous Metals Ministry and Medium Machine-Building Ministry have become the driving forces behind Russia's new economic policy.

It would have been nice if the authorities had bothered to tell us that they had set a course -- and not just economically -- back to the U.S.S.R.
Then again, not telling us is very much in line with the Soviet style of leadership, a haughty disdain for the governed that seemed to say: It doesn't matter if you believe us or not, we're still going to do it our way. [...]

More recently, media critic - and Izvestia opinion page editor - Alexei Pankin wrote about the "undemocratic" selection process at work in the TEFI Awards, Russia's equivalent of the Emmys:

"Television Awards and Democracy," by Alexei Pankin
Moscow Times, November 22, 2005, page 10

[...] [A]fter 10 years of experimenting, the academy instituted a procedure that the Communist Party rejected back in 1985: the roll-call vote. The voting now works like this. Three groups of 12 electors are selected at random from the body of 130 academy members. These electors in turn vote publicly for their favorite programs. "There's no way the selection is random," one academy observer told me after noticing that the voting groups included employees of the same stations whose shows were nominated for various awards.

I must admit this hadn't occurred to me, but given the authority of my source, I decided to check out the allegation. I asked one of the academy members if the selection was actually random. He clearly assumed that I wouldn't have asked unless I knew something, so his reply was evasive: "I have no proof to the contrary." Based on that reply, I began to think that he must know something that he could not or would not say without betraying an academy secret. And now I am sharing my own doubts with the readers of this column, leading you perhaps to question the integrity of the country's top television awards.

This story has much in common with the history of Russian democracy. Thanks to Mikhail Gorbachev, we received the full range of democratic rights, and since then we citizens have combined our efforts with those of the state to turn those rights into a joke. Even if an election were free and fair these days, no one would ever believe it.

"Heavenly" divorce

Well, I was listening to Echo of Moscow Radio over the internet last night, and I heard a news item which shocked me quite a bit. Apparently the biggest couple in Russian show-business, Filipp Kirkorov and Alla Pugachova, have divorced (the last link here is to a story in English - most of the others in this post are to Russian-language articles). It was a commonplace to joke about their "heavenly" marriage being a sham - Pugachova is substantially older than the sometimes flamboyant Kirkorov - and divorce has been rumored in the past, but I can't say I expected it to end like this. Apparently, they took care of the official paperwork all the way back in March of this year but saved the news until now in order to let talk-show host Lolita break the news on her program, "Bez Kompleksov" - another example of quality Channel One programming. According to her, the plan is for the pair to stay friends, and they still care about each other very much.

Apparently, though, the Russian public doesn't care that much any more. Today, Echo conducted an unscientific call-in survey of their listeners, and as it turns out they were not too sad to see this "fairytale romance" come to an end - only 18% said they were sad that the Pugachova-Kirkorov union was over.

Maybe the marriage crumbled under the stress created by Kirkorov's extensive public shaming (3 good articles in English there) in 2004 for calling journalist Irina Aroyan a c*** and mocking her accented Russian in a contretemps at a press-conference. News agency Regnum has a "dossier" of over 200 articles on this - filed under "The Kirkorov Scandal."

Fun from Russian Marketing Blog

The always-interesting Russian Marketing Blog has had a couple of especially quality posts recently. One of them discusses the infamous billboard ad for Finans magazine that showed a Euro symbol and a dollar sign, uh, coupling, and was captioned, "A magazine about how money is made."

This ad became legendary because the Moscow city authorities banned it soon after it showed up on billboards around the city a couple of years ago. RMB moves beyond the basic reaction ("he-he, the euro and dollar are 'doing it'") and considers the implications:

What are a dollar and a euro doing? This is a kind of psychological projective test. Me and most of my friends at the first glance thought they were dancing. But then we looked closer and realized they are doing something else. They are making money.

Still I cannot get the message of this ad. First, if the dollar becomes pregnant, what kind of money would it bear? Like, if you leave a dollar bill and a euro bill inside your wallet for a night then in the morning you will find a thousand rubles. Second, if they make money then the euro is definitely male and the dollar female. Why? Because euro is stronger than dollar? But then if the US Federal Reserve changes dollar discount rate would it change dollar sex as well.

In the fall of 2003, when this ad appeared, the Euro had relatively recently overtaken the dollar for the first time, exchange-rate-wise. This was a big issue in Russia, because so many people keep (kept?) their savings in cash dollars at home, and another way to interpret the ad is that the Euro is "screwing" the dollar. As I traveled to Western Europe during that time, and ever since, I know I felt like my dollars were getting screwed...

RMB also had a post recently about something that I've found amusing for some time: the phenomenon of Russian liquor producers using "replacement ads" to promote their brand. These are ads, ostensibly for water, chocolates, or pickled peppers, which prominently display the logo and colors of a brand of vodka, often with an ambiguous slogan (RMB notes one I haven't seen before - Slavyanskaya vodka/water's tagline is, “A person can stand three days without drinking. But he can also spend them drinking."). Meanwhile, the products ostensibly being advertised are nowhere to be seen in your local supermarket.

Resources for students

Students of Russian (and other Slavic & East European languages) should check out the Slavic and East European Language Resource Center. I may be biased, because the project was developed in part by some of my favorite professors ever - the wonderful family of people at Duke University's Department of Slavic Languages & Literature, which looks like it may now be called the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies - but if you're looking for an Albanian or Romani reference grammar, or a Russian Grammatical Dictionary - with sounds! - I'm not sure if there's anywhere else such things are to be found on the web.

A very different, but equally interesting, online resource that I happened upon recently is an extensive collection of materials on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, provided by the University of Michigan Special Collections Library.

New kid on the blog

There's an interesting new Moscow-related blog in the 'sphere: maaskva: nashimi glazami. This blog is pretty much unique in that nearly all of its posts are bilingual, including an English and a Russian version. The blog's genre could probably be called "slice-of-life," with a definite interactive twist - the blog invites readers to contribute their stories about life in Moscow.

What sold me on this blog and made me want to write it up at a time of day (night) when I should be going to sleep or already there? The author's description of Moscow, which is right on:

There are many little things about this big city I am thankful for: its people, its oh so predictable unpredictability, its sadness, its roughness, its aggressive and creative energy, its metro, its identity. Moscow knows who she is. It might not always be pretty, but boy does She have an answer! Pow!

Musings on the mess in the military

I've written before about Pavel Felgenhauer, the always-interesting "independent defense analyst." I've just read a rather long article of his that is all about the state of the Russian military and the bottom line of changes in its leadership in the past few years. His conclusion is that there hasn't been much actual change, to put it mildly. The article was in a pretty obscure publication about which a bit must be said.

When we were living up in Boston, I got onto the mailing list for "Perspective," a somewhat interesting newsletter published by the Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology & Policy at Boston University. It comes out rarely (between 2 and 4 times a year), so sometimes the articles are published with substantial delay. For example, there's an article in the October-November 2005 issue talking about reactions around the CIS to the Rose and Orange Revolutions, and it talks among other things about the reaction of "Kyrgyz President Askar Akayev" (I wonder where that one-time champion of democracy is today? Under suspicion, that's where.) without mentioning the Tulip Revolution of March 2005, which turned Akayev out of office rather unceremoniously. The only conclusion can be that the article was written before March, i.e., that at least 6 or 7 months elapsed before it was published.

All of that digression is just to note that I'm not sure how current Felgenhauer's article is, but I found it interesting enough to want to quote it at length here. You can read the whole article here, and my shorter but still lengthy edited version below. To sum up, former Chief of the General Staff Anatoly Kvashnin spent his time in the top post "involved in intrigue, in personal showoffs and occasional binge drinking"; and his replacement, Yuri Baluyevsky, is so competent that during negotiations with the Chinese over last summer's joint military exercises, and during the exercises themselves, "Baluyevsky was visibly at the helm, while [Defense Minister Sergei] Ivanov appeared on the scene briefly as the blabbing figurehead - that in fact he is." Nevertheless, the top military leadership is not engaging in meaningful reforms but is merely "busy misappropriating tens of billions of petrodollars that are being pumped into the defense budget."

Felgenhauer discusses the personalities a bit, but more importantly he has some very lucid things to say about the implications for military reform in Russia and addresses such questions as whether there is now (or ever will be) civilian management of the military in Russia. The article is peppered with sharp observations about things like how "laws passed by parliament are never of much importance" in Russia and how the growing number of contract ("volunteer") soldiers in Russia's army is nothing but a "typical Putinite Potemkin village-style reform that will cost the budget billions, while not solving any real problems." The bottom line? "Within the Russian military something is constantly changing, but the basics do not seem to change at all."

[Read more...]

"Russia's Imperial General Staff," Pavel Felgenhauer
Perspective, October-November 2005, page 1

In July 2004, General Anatoly Kvashnin - number two in the Russian military hierarchy - was dismissed as Chief of Russia's all-powerful General Staff after seven years of holding the job. The ouster ended a public brawl between Kvashnin and his immediate superior Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, appointed by President Vladimir Putin in 2001.

Before taking on Ivanov, Kvashnin publicly locked horns with the previous Defense Minister (1997-2001) Marshal Igor Sergeyev and eventually succeeded in ousting him. During his tenure, Kvashnin often made reckless public statements. In June 2003, Kvashnin surprised the nation by announcing publicly that the Russian military was in a "post-critical state" and had degraded into a rabble of thieves and crooks. [...]

There was much talk of a profound contraction of responsibilities of the General Staff after Kvashnin's ouster and of a "strengthening" of the role of the Defense Ministry. On June 19, commenting on the dismissal of Kvashnin and the appointment of his successor - General Yuri Baluyevsky - as Chief of the General Staff, Ivanov told journalists: "Putin and I believe that the General Staff must concentrate on long-term planning of the future development of the Armed Forces and the modeling of the wars of the future, while working less on current matters in the units and crisis managing."

In May 2004, in the annual address to a joint session of both chambers of parliament, Putin not only talked of "modernization of the army" being a national priority, but also specifically mentioned "civil control" of defense spending as essential to reform. Putin's pronouncements strongly indicated a serious change in our military, since meaningful "civil control" is surely impossible, while an omnipotent General Staff continues to be in charge.

Were Putin and Ivanov serious, when calling for reform? Today, over a year later in October 2005, it's clear that it was all just talk, that a personality clash between Ivanov and Kvashnin masqueraded as something more serious. [...]

Baluyevsky is a much less ambitious person than Kvashnin and at the same time, a much better military top staff professional. During the years that Baluyevsky was Kvashnin's number two in the General Staff, he was running the entire outfit, while Kvashnin was involved in intrigue, in personal showoffs and occasional binge drinking. (Baluyevsky, as well as Ivanov, according to overall Russian standards of general officer alcohol consumption, may be called teetotalers).

Baluyevsky's lack of ambition has made his relations with Ivanov much smoother than Kvashnin could ever manage. For more than a year there have been no public spats between the General Staff and the Minister. At the same time, Baluyevsky's professional and organizational capabilities have in fact accelerated the role of the General Staff in decision-making. For example, during the arduous negotiations with the Chinese military over joint exercises that eventually took place in Aug. 2005 on the shore of Tsingtao peninsula south-west of Beijing, and during the actual execution of the maneuvers, Baluyevsky was visibly at the helm, while Ivanov appeared on the scene briefly as the blabbing figurehead - that in fact he is.

Since Baluyevsky was in fact running the General Staff under Kvashnin, it would be unreasonable to expect that policies and procedure would change dramatically, when after many years of working the show behind the scenes, a person finally becomes number one and officially in charge. The Law on Defense was rewritten and direct references depicting the role of the General Staff were dropped, but in real life, this did not change much. In Russia, laws passed by parliament are never of much importance. The ruling bureaucracy interprets the laws and issues its own executive ordinances on how they should be implemented. Parliament does not have any power to control how laws are interpreted or implemented, it cannot censure any minister, and it does not have the power to subpoena any executive official to give evidence under oath. [...]

After the demise of the Soviet Union, President Boris Yelπtsin was pressed to appoint a genuine civilian as Defense Minister, but balked at the idea to have a fellow politician with political ambitions in charge of the Russian (Soviet) military machine. General Igor Rodionov was retired in 1996 to pose for several months as a "civilian Defense Minister," former KGB General Ivanov is today playing the same role, but the Soviet structure of the Defense Ministry, and General Staff have been preserved since 1991 without much change. [...]

Russian military intelligence - GRU, as big in size as the former KGB and spread over all continents - is an integral part of the General Staff. Through GRU, the General Staff controls the supply of vital information to all other decision-makers in all matters concerning defense procurement planning, threat assessment and so on. High-ranking former GRU officers have told me that in Soviet times the General Staff used the GRU to grossly, deliberately and constantly mislead the Kremlin about the magnitude and gravity of the military threat posed by the West in order to help inflate military expenditure. There are serious indications that at present the same foul practice is continuing. [...]

The Russian/Soviet top military administration has demonstrated remarkable consistency in structure, procedure and strategic intentions during periods of unusual change in Russia, and the total dominance of the General Staff in decision making has been preserved the whole time. This has provided stability and continuity of command within our military. All major players seem, at present, to be content to keep it as it is: The military chiefs mind their own affairs without much control and do not in any way threaten the Kremlin, while staying busy misappropriating tens of billions of petrodollars that are being pumped into the defense budget.

In many public speeches Putin and Ivanov called for the creation of a more compact, well-armed, modern military. At the same time, our high brass still insists upon sustaining a mass mobilization armed force with relatively cheap, mass-produced tanks and guns. The legacy of World War II is still considered, in our military academies, as the finest of modern military tactics, operational art and strategy. Suggestions that drastically would cut numbers in exchange for increasing quality are dismissed as pro-Western diversions that are intended to "disarm Russia" in the event of an imminent U.S.-lead NATO invasion.

The end result is a "strategic compromise" that merges irreconcilable patterns of military planning and development. Russia is trying at the same time to have a Soviet-type mass army of conscripts and reservists, while at the same time attempting to assemble hundreds of contract solders to form new professional units. As a result, Putin and Ivanov get the worst of both: An old Soviet-type armed force with a Soviet command structure that is continuing to decompose, and in essence, has lost the ability to fight the "big wars" it was built to fight. Any mass mobilization is now a dream, since the reservists are not trained and the heavy weapons in the storage bases are old and mostly dysfunctional. The "permanent readiness" units are also equipped with the same old weapons and inadequately trained.

Deputy Defense Minister General Alexander Belousov told journalists in September 2005 that 70 percent of contract soldiers recruited today are in fact conscripts that sign on after half a year of conscript service. The forced redressing of conscripts into "volunteer contract solders and sergeants" is a typical Putinite Potemkin village-style reform that will cost the budget billions, while not solving any real problems. [...]

Within the Russian military something is constantly changing, but the basics do not seem to change at all

Overheard in Moscow

This LiveJournal community (in Russian) allows users to contribute transcripts of conversations overheard on the streets and in public transit in Moscow. The first place I read about this was in Russian Life magazine, but Digenis had the story first.

One of my favorite publications, Bol'shoi Gorod, has a piece in a recent issue titled "Tasty Conversations," which may or may not have been inspired by the "overheard in Moscow" LJ site, and which - if you believe the commenters on the web version of the article - may or may not be fictional. I was reading this a couple of nights ago in a fit of procrastination and found myself laughing out loud.

The conversations were supposedly overheard in Cafe Pushkin. The upscale restaurant, which has stayed popular for too long to call it trendy, is right around the corner from BG's editorial offices, so maybe they really did have their writers sitting in there for hours at a time waiting for the people at neighboring tables to say something interesting. But some of the conversations seem too good to be true, not to mention the fact that many of them reveal details about the people speaking which you'd like to think a journalist wouldn't want to publish without getting consent. I wanted to write that they've succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist, but that sounds a bit pompous...

If I were a betting man, I'd say the conversations are probably fictional, but as I enjoyed them I found that to be almost beside the point. Maybe one of the commenters who suggested that some of the conversations are real and some are fake had it figured out. Anyway, they took me right back to Moscow and made me feel very nostalgic. They are full people who are gossipy, silly, self-absorbed and self-important, sometimes drunk and often unhappy. I guess when you grow to love a city, and it's forever, you love that city and the characteristics of its inhabitants warts and all. Anyway, if this is fiction, I hope some of the writers involved (it was a team effort) are working on first novels. I was going to try translating one of the funnier ones, but they are so full of colloquialisms that I don't think the humor would really come through.

VVP on energy policy

Harley Balzer has an interesting article in the "National Interest" magazine (or at least on their website) which summarizes an article which Putin wrote about Russian energy policy some years ago and explores the question of whether that article has any implications for the approach that his administration is currently following. Definitely worth a read.

My favorite line from the article, though, has nothing to do with energy policy specifically but encapsulates an idea that's often occurred to me while engaged in arguments with Russians about their country's policies: "It is profoundly disturbing that many people who wish Russia well are characterized as anti-Russian for raising inconvenient questions." Indeed.

Tragedy and farce in torts class

I've tried not to share many law school moments on this blog - it's off-topic, for one thing, and, for another thing, most of those moments are not very interesting. For example, it's not often that the cases one reads as a first-year law student are the sort of thing that leads you to laugh out loud. But today's Torts class was an exception to the general rule of boring 1L reading.

From the case of Carvalho v. Decorative Fabrics Co.:

The petitioner worked in respondent's factory as a 'flock-boy.' His duties consisted of handling and working with yarn. At the end of a work shift it was customary for fellow employees to assist each other in removing the lint and yarn which accumulated on their clothing by use of an airhose. On the particular day in question, February 25, 1974, a fellow worker, while cleaning the yarn from petitioner's clothing, placed the airhose in the vicinity of petitioner's rectum causing petitioner to be knocked to the floor.

On the following evening, petitioner began suffering severe pain and discomfort and was taken by a friend to the emergency room of the Pawtucket Memorial Hospital. There he was examined by a physician who diagnosed the injury as a perforated rectum.

The question in this case was whether such an injury should be covered by workmen's compensation insurance. But the more important lesson that I took away from it was a lesson that applies to all sorts of dangerous pranks - it's all in good fun until someone's rectum gets perforated. The synopsis in our casebook didn't even mention that the victim's title was "flock-boy," but this case still had the lecture hall laughing out loud.

We then moved on to the case of Kerr-McGee Corp. v. Hutto, where the court's majority opinion was that a death in the workplace was compensable by the state's workmen's comp scheme despite the unusual circumstances of the employee's death - one justice dissented:

I must respectfully dissent from the opinion of the majority of the Court which holds that workmen's compensation benefits must be paid for the death of a service station attendant who was shot and killed because he was engaged in a love affair with the wife of the service station owner (the wife managed the station where the deceased worked).

I firmly believe in the concept of workmen's compensation for the protection of workers who are killed or injured from the hazards of their work. However, to allow benefits for injuries or death arising out of a love affair, as in the present case, seems to me to stretch the workmen's compensation concept too far and certainly far beyond the intent of the legislature which provided that benefits would only be payable for injuries or death arising out of and in the course of a workman's employment. I fail to see how Mr. Hutto's employment had anything to do with his death except to afford the amorous couple the opportunity to meet.

Oh, the humanity of it all...

More on the detrimental effects of blogging

Slate writes this week about how bloggers in academia have a hard time getting taken seriously when they are up for tenure review (thanks to Bram for bringing this article to my attention). The article is long but interesting and should make every blogger think - well, except for those who either blog for a living or are independently wealthy and don't need to worry about getting - or losing - a job in the future. I always expect a potential employer to Google me and find this blog, which is why I try to keep things more or less within reasonable boundaries. But it's entirely possible that someone could read the wrong few posts and think they don't want to hire someone so opinionated. Just makes you think about maintaining a healthy degree of self-censorship.

For some reason this all reminds me of the old Russian saying - a word is not a swallow - once you let it go, you can't catch it again (since I don't have a Russian keyboard handy, I'll render the original as "Slovo ne vorobei - otpustish', ne poimaiesh'", and will invite anyone who thinks I've got it wrong to comment). Even if you delete your blog, I think Google still keeps it cached for a while. So be good, for goodness' sake.

"Spinning Russia"

CEIP's in-house organ, "Foreign Policy" magazine, has a rather interesting article on their website about the Russian government's efforts to deal with the country's "image problem." One of the major elements of the image restoration strategy is the launch of an English-language TV channel, "Russia Today."

The channel’s chief editor is 25-year-old former Kremlin pool reporter Margarita Simonian. She says she has the strength to stand up to any Kremlin pressure, but when I asked her to name Putin’s greatest flaw, she paused for a long time, and said, “It’s a huge country.” When I asked her what she meant, the pause was so long and awkward that I felt sorry for her and changed the subject.

Loyal "Scraps of Moscow" readers will remember Ms. Simonian from her appearance here last spring as the recipient of an award from Minister of Defense Sergei Ivanov. She was rewarded then for "strengthening fellowship in battle"; the task now before her, buffing Russia's image with foreign TV viewers, will definitely require all of the "courage and fortitude" with which Ivanov credited her. Turns out, according to a different article about "Russia Today" by the same author as the "Spinning Russia" piece, Simonian was also the fortunate recipient of flowers from President Putin himself on the relatively recent occasion of her 25th birthday.

Because Simonian apparently enjoys such favor from Putin and his inner circle, and because it looks like the launch of "Russia Today" is going to be, among other things, an opportunity for certain principals involved to make their careers or get rich by diverting some of the $30m which the government has earmarked for the project, I was tempted to take a cynical approach and headline this post something like "Oh, to be young and a sellout patriot!"

However, in an effort to be "fair and balanced," I have to admit that I'm glad to see the Russian government at least trying to improve its image. One would hope they would focus also on some of the substantive issues which have caused their "image problem," but at least realizing there is a problem is a good first step.

And I have to say that I absolutely understand Simonian's response to the reporter's question above. She wasn't hired to comment on Putin's flaws, and her response about Russia being a "huge country" is an excuse that a lot of people make for why it's so poorly governed. Furthermore, while in general the Russian government might be able to teach even the Bush Administration a thing or two about cronyism, in this case the Kremlin has shown that it realizes the importance of the job by going with a professional (albeit a young, apparently loyal, and presumably easily controlled one) in selecting Russia Today's chief editor. That's more than the Bushies can say about their "public diplomacy" efforts, of which the signal event of late has been the disastrous Middle East tour by long-time Bush friend Karen Hughes.

The eXile had a piece this past summer (one that was actually reminiscent of the high standards of that newspaper's commentary 5+ years ago, a rarity nowadays) about the "Russia Today" project, comparing it at length to similar American propaganda efforts past and present.

Slate critic likes Tatu

I hesitate to break my long silence with something this fluffy, but this story is worth checking out if you have any familiarity with or interest in the Russian pop music scene. The music critic on internet magazine Slate, an enclave of the American intelligentsia (to the extent that there is such a thing), not only loved Tatu's "All the Things She Said" (the English-language version, sort of, of "Ya Soshla s Uma"), but was surprised by the quality of the duo's latest release:

t.A.T.u., the most shameless of all manufactured pop sensations, have become critics' darlings. Dangerous and Moving can be described, without reservations, as a very good second album. It's stronger and stranger than the debut, and t.A.T.u.'s improbably winning songwriting formula—equal parts Roxette, Nine Inch Nails, and Buddha Bar—has, by now, been sharpened into the kind of sound you recognize from the opening bar.

Guess it must be worth a listen. I haven't heard the new album, so I don't really have anything to say about it, but I do remember that their first album was much more enjoyable than one might have guessed.

What happened in Nalchik? And what does it mean?

I can't presume to answer these questions from so far away. But luckily the Institute for War and Peace Reporting has people on the scene who have provided what seem to me to be comprehensive and informative accounts. I haven't had time to scan the English-language mainstream media for Nalchik coverage, so I might be wrong about this, but I would guess these pieces are better than most of what you'll find there. See below.

Counting the Cost of Nalchik's 24-Hour War

Soul-Searching After Kabardino-Balkaria Violence

"The Television is Broken"

I saw a great article in yesterday's Johnson's Russia List. Johnson had it headlined, "Commentator Sees Declining Influence of Russian Television on Public Opinion." I wasn't able to find the English-language version or the original in Russian anywhere online, but I liked the article so much (Panyushkin's comment about "idiot housewives" notwithstanding) that I'm posting the full text here. He says it all better than I possibly could:

Commentary by Valeriy Panyushkin: "The Television Is Broken"
Gazeta.ru, October 11, 2005

They have lost us. They are the government. And we are the people. They are pulling on the bridle that used to hold us, but the bridle no longer leads to an iron bit, and the bit no longer bites into our mouths. They still turn the screw the way they used to, but the screw has slipped from its threads and turning it no longer causes it to tighten. They have lost us. No one knows how we live or who we listen to, and no one knows what we will be up to tomorrow.

Television was the bridle and the screw. Do you recall how in 1999 Vladimir Putin was able to use television to go from being an unknown prime minister with a 2% popularity rating to a universally beloved president with a rating above 50%? Back then you could persuade us with television, intimidate us with television, mobilize us with television. Television was a powerful political weapon. Naturally the government took control of that weapon and sharpened it for its own ends. Recall how undesirable television hosts disappeared, how live broadcasts were taken off the air, how opposition politicians disappeared from our screens.

The only problem was that television is only a powerful political weapon on one condition. We can only be persuaded, intimidated or mobilized by television on one condition, namely that we watch it and believe it. But we do not watch it or believe it anymore.

The television ratings that five years ago were led by news and political analysis shows are now filled with series. People are not watching the news, and they are not watching political analysis. Television has come to be viewed purely as entertainment. That is to say, it has lost it propaganda role, because no one would ever think of agitating the people using the merry-go-rounds in a recreational park.

Television's audience has changed. If you take a look at the sociological research you can instantly see that working men and working women have stopped watching television. The only ones still watching are idiot housewives and children. Children do not vote. Idiot housewives are told by their husbands for whom to vote. True, old people still watch television, but everyone know they vote for the communists.

People who make decisions, even people who make decisions at the family level, even simply heads of households, are not watching television. The government can no longer influence the way they think.

Indirect confirmation of this comes in the form of the latest television hero: the sorcerer Grabovoy. No serious person is going to watch Grabovoy. A working man or a working woman, even if they do not have higher education, is going to turn off that junk immediately, because a serious person has no desire to fill his or her head with that junk. And if Grabovoy is getting ratings, that means that it is idiots who are watching television these days. The last time sorcerers, mediums and gods appeared on television was 15 years ago, before the country fell apart, when no one believed television except for idiots. And if there are sorcerers on the screen now, and idiots in front of the screen, then that means that television has once again ceased to be a propaganda weapon, just like it did back then, before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

You may have noticed that in recent weeks television has suddenly started showing people who for the longest time had no access to the TV screen. Now it is none other than members of the opposition who are getting on television. Boris Nemtsov, Irina Khakamada and sometimes even communists are appearing and saying things. When was the last time that Khakamada was invited to appear on television? You may recall that two years ago she was even forbidden to appear on the game show "Chto? Gde? Kogda?" (What? Where? When?). Do you know what has happened?

They, the government, are trying to rectify the disastrous state of the television audience. They are bringing opposition politicians back to television just a little bit, and they are letting television do just a little bit of live broadcasting. And if you have not noticed these changes, that means that you do not watch television, which fact only serves to confirm what I have said about the declining role of this most important of the arts.

We the people have stopped watching television as if breaking a chain, losing the bridle or stripping the threads on the turned screw. Does that mean that we have become free? No. A dog that slips his chain or a horse that slips his bridle do not become free, they tumble headfirst. And if the threads of a screw are stripped, the mechanism held in place by the screw does not become freer, it runs out of control.

A discouraging picture: they, the government, can no longer control us in any way except by force of arms, and now we are running out of control.