Happy Holidays!

[recycled from last year...]

Best wishes to all for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2009! We're enjoying the holidays in DC and remembering the Moscow new year's celebrations of past years.

Dreams and memories

tema has enough pull in the LJ-osphere that his post about the tragic loss of the Sh-2 ceilings (which prompted me to echo his lament) led to his coming into possession of a lovely six-ring scrap of said ceilings. For him, it was as if "a dream came true." And all I have is this none too arty photographic memory of the quirky ceiling rings, taken several summers ago as I was about to board the quasi-red-eye to Tashkent:

A bipartisan approach to Russia

A friend of mine who runs a think tank in DC was in Moscow late last month and filed these three dispatches on his organization's blog. Worth checking out if you're interested in contemplating how the next chapter in the relationship might unfold and what people are thinking about in Washington.

Across the board and the political spectrum, I am hearing the same thing from Russian experts: trust and confidence in the United States has not been lower since the end of the Cold War. In fact, it’s not a distrust of American motives that poisons the relationship (though a handful of Russian nationalists/hawks still cling to the notion that the US has cynical “grand designs” on the former Soviet sphere of influence) but a distrust of our competence to wield power responsibly [...]

All in all, the current Russian perspective on the US is one of fear and insecurity–not because Russians think the US has evil intentions, but because they are certain we have no idea how to pursue our various noble-sounding global objectives without leaving utter chaos and destruction in our wake.

These takeaways from interactions with Russian elites actually sound much more optimistic than I would have expected, and Matt's policy recommendations are also a bit optimistic, but I suppose we must allow ourselves the audacity of optimism.

Wordle breaks down "tandemocracy"

Now that Andy has introduced us to the wonders of Wordle, I figured I had to apply this fun tool to try to go at the differences between the members of Russia's current "duumvirate," or whatever you want to call it, amateur-Kremlinologist-style. Let's see what a word cloud based on the news feed from Putin's premier.gov.ru vanity site looks like:
The weighty abbreviation for "billions" takes pride of place, "dollars" is not far behind, and VVP's cloud is full of action verbs and meaty nouns.

Now let's compare the word cloud based on the RSS feed of Medvedev's speeches (granted, not a perfect comparison, because Medvedev is not referred to in the third person in any of these items as Putin is in some of the items used to form his word cloud)
Can you feel the difference? It looks like Medvedev really is more of a fluffy teddy bear, giving substantial weight to "cooperation" and talking a lot about being "happy." Obviously it would be foolish to give any weight to this overall, but I'll allow myself a moment of optimism that both Medvedev and his new counterpart in the White House will at least try to "think cooperation."

More fun with maps

Regular readers will recall my summertime practice of scanning in and posting maps, mostly of the Caucasus and various regions thereof - see the photoset here and previous map-themed posts here.

Recently I've been taking advantage of London's status as the center of the world's antique maps trade and have been checking out some of the offerings. The two maps below are not exactly antique - they are from Harmsworth's Atlas, n.d. but variously dated as 1919-1923 - but they are pretty interesting. The first appears to show the brief period after WWI during which the states of the South Caucasus were independent. The second shows that Romania within its current borders (much less its interwar borders) is a relatively recent phenomenon and that when it comes to the notion of redrawing borders in that part of the world, just about any group can select a long-ago date to use as a reference point that would give it more than what it has today.

Caucasia, view full-sized version here.

Romania Historical, view full-sized version here.

The more things change...

Try to guess who wrote the following passage and when:

The traditional American Sovietologists harp on the difficulties and unpredictability of Russia's internal processes, which do not fit the usual Western criteria and stereotypes. Some analysts cannot accept the idea of a strong Russia, whether it be imperial or democratic. They propose that the West either take a wait-and-see approach or develop a new containment strategy.

Partnership opponents within Russia...reject cooperation with the West as inseparable from the democratizing of Russia, and view democratization itself as an obstacle to renewed authoritarianism and the forceful establishment of "order" within the territory of the former Soviet Union.

All the opponents of partnership - Russian and American - share the thesis that Russia is doomed to confrontation with the world around it and that East and West are fatally incompatible.

The author of these lines was Yeltsin's first Foriegn Minister, Andrei Kozyrev, writing in the May/June 1994 issue of Foreign Affairs. That article, titled "The Lagging Partnership," also had the following forward-looking statement, which might seem prophetic had it not been fairly self-evident at the time:

Russian foreign policy inevitably has to be of an independent and assertive nature. If Russian democrats fail to achieve it, they will be swept away by a wave of aggressive nationalism, which is now exploiting the need for national and state self-assertion.

Not that the Putvedev years have been years of unadulterated "aggressive nationalism," but the guys in power have certainly learned to ride that wave.

A thousand words

Assuming these photos are not the result of creative Photoshopping (and I have no reason to think they are), each provides a bit of wonderful, if somewhat dated, political commentary.

They are both by iruha, a photoblogger who lives in Elista, which by all accounts I've seen (particularly this one) is at least an interesting place to visit.

I found these masterpieces entered in an online photo contest sponsored by Samsung:

Author's caption: "This is our motherland"
This is a suitable epitaph for the erstwhile political party Rodina (Motherland),
which often seemed more concerned with stirring up ethnic tension than with
helping out Russians like the elderly woman foraging for food in this photo.

Author's caption: "Election campaign" ("предвыборная гонка")
The sign on the truck reads, "[2nd] of December - Everyone to the polls!"

Transnistrian developments

Post-soviet de facto "presidents" Bagapsh, Kokoity and Smirnov adorn a billboard in Tiraspol.
Two of these men are now recognized by Moscow as Presidents (without the scare quotes).
[image source]

For those of you interested in the still-"frozen" conflict in Moldova (interest in which has increased after the unfreezing of the conflicts in Georgia this summer), I have collected a few relatively recent and worthwhile articles on the topic.

The must-read of the bunch is by William Hill, who provides both an excellent grounding in the history of the conflict for those less familiar with it and the level of insight one would expect from someone who has been involved in the resolution process for years.

Another interesting perspective is provided by Thomas de Waal, dean of the Caucasus conflict journalists, who reflects on his first visit to Transnistria and breaks down some of the key differences between Moldova's secessionist conflict and the ones in the Caucasus.

If you're interested in the view from Tiraspol, this write-up of Transnistria's de facto leadership's visit to Moscow earlier this fall (by the region's acting foreign minister) provides some insight. Unfortunately, the translation is not perfect and to get the full flavor you should read the original version in Russian. As an example of what gets lost in translation, the sentence translated as the neutral-sounding "The Russian Federation has already rendered assistance to Transnistria" could just as easily have been translated as "[Transnistria] is experienced in receiving aid from Russia," which puts the secessionist leaders' hat-in-hand trip to Moscow in a somewhat different light.

Finally, this article by a Moscow analyst discusses why a settlement did not take place after a flurry of activity this fall and why one may not be likely in the foreseeable future. The Russian version is available here.

For ongoing coverage of developments, you can sign up for this regular email bulletin put out by a Moldovan think-tank which includes a section on Transnistria, although the English version is sometimes incomprehensible.

"Our strength is in unity!"
[image source]

South Ossetian Shakeup?

«Не место этому президенту в Южной Осетии» // Бывший секретарь совбеза республики о конфликте с Эдуардом Кокойты Герой войны в Южной Осетии, бывший секретарь совбеза республики АНАТОЛИЙ БАРАНКЕВИЧ рассказал спецкору “Ъ” ОЛЬГЕ АЛЛЕНОВОЙ о причинах своего увольнения, конфликте с президентом Кокойты, а также о кадровой и экономической политике Цхинвала. открыть материал ...

Kommersant has run a lengthy interview with former Russian army general and former South Ossetian de facto Minister of Defense which puts the region's president, former wrestling champion and phys. ed. teacher Eduard Kokoity, in a rather unflattering light.

General Anatoly Barankevich is one of the examples cited in recent years by Western observers in order to highlight the fact that South Ossetian secessionism at some point shifted from "self-determination" to a situation where the determination of key personnel appointments took place in Moscow. There were other former (or seconded) Russian officers serving in the territory's de facto government, but he was among the most prominent. And now he has come out with an interview mocking Kokoity's flight from Tskhinvali during the five-day war and relating tales of a reconstruction effort paralyzed by corruption.

One of the more damning excerpts reads as follows (my translation, hopefully Kommersant will put this on their English-language website but they haven't done so yet) - Barankevich is relating a scene he observed at a police station in Dzhava on August 10th:

And then I saw the following picture: a Georgian prisoner with his hands tied and shirt off, his hands had already gone blue, you couldn't see his eyes, he couldn't even cry, and the [South Ossetian] militants [бойцы, apparently police officers - trans.] were beating him. I went over to them and said, "What are you doing? You are mountain men [горцы - implying, apparently, that they should hew to some code of honor - trans.]. You can't beat a prisoner, his hands are tied." They looked embarrassed and said, "Sorry, comrade General."

I told them to go get someone from the KGB. To take the Georgian away. Right away they untied his hands. And then the president showed up. He saw me, saw the prisoner and understood what was going on. And the first thing he did was run up to the prisoner and start kicking him. It turned my stomach. The guys from the police looked at the ground, they were ashamed.

Without wanting to engage in too much Kremlinological tea-leaf-reading, one wonders what the publication of this interview means, given that it was published in a newspaper owned by Alisher Usmanov, the Kremlin-friendly oligarch and debt collector for Gazprom who - no doubt out of the goodness of his heart, and certainly not to win a natural resource tender - ponied up a billion rubles in aid for the post-war rebuilding effort in South Ossetia in September.

I somehow doubt that Eduard Kokoity is feeling comfortable in his presidential chair.

Research Bliss

I strongly advise anyone interested in researching Russia's turbulent '90s to head to Kommersant's searchable archive of articles, which contains materials dating back to 1991. I don't know when they made all of the back-issues available, but it is a remarkable and useful resource. The website will even generate code for inclusion in a blog of any article you find in the archive, although it's not all gussied up with a picture like it is for more current articles.

Below is a link to an article I happened upon about the re-registration of Moscow residents in 1999. As I was reading it, before seeing the by-line at the bottom, I wondered what might have become of the journalist who wrote such a wonderful story - touching, humorous and incisive all at the same time. Turns out it was written by one of the giants of Russian journalism, Valery Panyushkin.

Бизнес на гостях // 21 сентября в Москве закончилась перерегистрация иногородних. Теперь ходят слу открыть материал ...