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At the starting line

Mar 27th 2008
From Economist.com

Tibet, the Olympics and the Baltic republics

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THE highest point in the Baltic states is Big Egg Mountain in Estonia, at a towering 318 metres above sea level, about one-thirtieth of the height of Everest. That aside, the similarities between the Baltic states and Tibet are striking.

Both were wiped off the map by much larger neighbours, who criminalise any expression of national sentiment (the Tibetan flag is banned by the Chinese authorities, just as owning a flag in the colours of the pre-war Baltic republics guaranteed harsh punishment in the Soviet era). In both Tibet and the Baltics, public yearning for independence is matched by apathy from the outside world.

The Kremlin’s policy of using migration and forced Russification to counter “nationalist” tendencies in the Baltic states was pretty similar to China's current policy in Tibet. The bogus rhetoric of communist ethnic harmony (“Be like us and we can all be happy”) is almost identical, as is the genuine incomprehension among the dominant ethnic group (Russians in the Soviet Union, Han Chinese in the People’s Republic) that minorities have anything to complain about.

If by some historical fluke Tibet regains independence, it will face the same problems as Estonia and Latvia with their Soviet-era Russian migrants. Will the Chinese settlers who have so contemptuously refused to learn Tibetan become automatic citizens of the new country?

For both the Baltic states then and Tibet now, émigré outfits matter a lot. The Tibetan government-in-exile is the symbolic focus of the country’s statehood, maintaining legal continuity from the days when it ran a real country. The feeling of slightly desperate, dusty determination in Tibetan offices is uncannily like that in the Baltic states’ surviving embassies in the 1980s.

The big difference, of course, is the Dalai Lama, who has the star appeal of Pope John Paul II, Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi combined. Ernst Jaakson, the Estonian consul-general in New York, and Stasys Lozoraitis, the Lithuanian ambassador to the Vatican, were both deeply impressive, but hardly household names.

And now the Olympics. The Moscow games in 1980 and then the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984 were a chance for both sides to fight their propaganda war. The Kremlin staged the sailing events in Estonia, hoping to undermine the non-recognition policy maintained by most western countries (who regarded the Baltic republics as occupied territories rather than Soviet Socialist Republics).

In Washington, DC, a group calling themselves the Embassy 18 chained themselves to the then-Soviet embassy, hanging a banner across 16th St reading “Lithuania 1940, Afghanistan 1980”. It showed “Happy Mischa” (the cuddly ursine mascot of the Soviet Olympic effort) dancing on a pile of skulls.

Tibetan efforts against this year’s games will be more dramatic. Disrupting the torch-lighting ceremony in Athens was just the start. But does it do any good? Interfering with sport—a secular religion in much of the world—risks annoying the apolitical, rather than highlighting the desired cause.

At least it is clear that staging an Olympic games sharpens choices for a totalitarian regime. Even the most brutal party hacks and secret policemen realise that when you are trying to showcase your system, beating people up in public risks giving the wrong impression. What will the Chinese authorities do if thousands of athletes are wearing “illegal” Dalai Lama badges?

It is easy to forget how bleak the chances of restoring Baltic independence seemed only 25 years ago. Imagine the Tibetan team at the 2036 Olympics. Farfetched? Perhaps. But in 1980 few would have placed a bet on Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian teams appearing in international sport ever again.

Maclean's interview

Interview with Edward Lucas

'It's as shocking to have a former KGB official running Russia as it would be to have a former SS colonel running Germany'

CHARLIE GILLIS | March 12, 2008 |

Edward Lucas has spent the past 20 years working as a journalist in eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, covering the heady days at the end of the Cold War. Then came the rise of President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin's crackdown on dissent — developments that transformed the British reporter from a detached observer into a passionate advocate for a hardline stand against Moscow. His new book, The New Cold War: Putin's Russia and the Threat to the West, outlines his fears about the country's authoritarian drift and its impact on the world beyond. Now eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist magazine, Lucas spoke to Maclean's about Russia's new-found assertiveness, and why the complacent West must take notice.

Q: Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian reporter who was assassinated, was a friend of yours. Her name and address had appeared on an online "death list" shortly before the killing. Another of your journalist friends who had been critical of the Kremlin appeared on a similar list and now lives in fear. Is it fair to say the story of post-Soviet Russia has gotten personal for you?

A: It is personal in many ways. One is that I grew up with the Cold War very present in my life. I remember my father [an Oxford academic] risking his freedom by smuggling the works of Greek philosophers into Prague, giving them to people willing to risk their freedoms to discuss them. That left quite an impression. I was also there for the collapse of Communism, and it was a great few years of my life. A lot of my friends were in jail during the Communist era and then went on to become politicians and journalists. I don't want to see all that being undone now.

Q: You've been accused of fear-mongering about Russia, and about Vladimir Putin. How do you respond?

A: If I sound alarmist, it's because I'm alarmed. I travel all over the region and I see that Russia's pushing back hard. I also worry about what's happening inside Russia. I'm not prepared to sit back and say Russia's always been authoritarian and imperialist and we have to get on with it. It's not good for Russians and it's certainly not good for us.

Q: You do, however, compare the West's view of Russia today to the one we held in the 1930s. You also draw a parallel to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Nazi Germany.

A: I'm trying to wake people up. I think we've been in a pretty deep sleep about Russia. There's been a lot of wishful thinking, and I use the comparisons with the Third Reich because it's important to remember that the two totalitarian empires were pretty similar before the war. Stalin was killing more people than Hitler at that time, and we tend to forget how much the Soviet totalitarian past still overshadows Russia. So I make the historical comparisons so people will remember. When Putin says the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [of non-aggression between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, which divided the potential spoils of war in eastern Europe] is legal, that would be as shocking as if a German leader said the anschluss, or the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, was legal. It's as shocking, in a way, to have a former KGB official running Russia as it would be to have a former SS colonel running Germany.

Q: Why do we project hope rather than pessimism onto Russia?

A: Part of it is just mental laziness. We've gotten used to the idea that Russia's okay, that it's a partner. That's a very comforting position, and it's been the dominant theme in the West for 10 years now. I just don't think it's justified by facts anymore.

Q: One of the pivotal developments in post-Soviet Russia has been the rise of former KGB operatives and their transformation into a political force. Did the rest of the world fail to grasp what was happening?

A: The KGB made a slow comeback. Pictures of the statue in front of [KGB headquarters] being pulled down as the Cold War ended made us feel that it had been toppled, just like the Stasi in East Germany. It came quite close to that; they had a hemorrhaging during that time where people went into the private sector, and the rest of the world wrote off the KGB as a force. In actual fact, it was being relabelled and topped up throughout the 1990s. The old spymaster Yevgeny Primakov came back to head the foreign intelligence service, and by the time Putin became head of what is now the FSB, he didn't look that different from the previous lot. When Putin became prime minister [in 1999], Primakov had already been in that position, too. And then we had this series of spectacular terrorist attacks in Moscow, blamed on the Chechens, which gave Putin the perfect opportunity to be tough. Soon after that came 9/11, and Putin said he was onside on the war on terror. We were in the mood for someone pretty tough to run Russia.

Q: Dmitri Medvedev, the president-elect, is not specifically a product of that milieu, though. He is often dismissed as Putin's poodle, but he has given voice to some liberal-sounding ideas about freedom and the rule of law. Are we short-selling him?

A: He's been a very efficient, loyal sidekick to Putin. And yes, there's always a chance that Medvedev's liberal rhetoric will turn into something in practice. But we didn't see it when he was running Gazprom, the state-controlled oil company. It was very opaque and inefficiently run. If he is a born-again crusader for legality and transparency, it's not borne out by his record.

Q: Can Putin maintain his current level of influence from the PM's position?

A: You know, Stalin was never prime minister or president. He was just general secretary of the party. It may be that Putin will go back to being chairman of United Russia [his political party]. I don't think he's going to stay as prime minister, because there's too much responsibility, and the prime minister gets blamed for everything. In the past few years, when things went wrong Putin has blamed prime ministers and has even sacked them. As chair of United Russia, you're basically unsackable and it has become the party of power. Personally, I think he'd like to come back as president, and that will require Medvedev to change the constitution.

Q: I think a lot of Westerners will be struck — shocked maybe — by your conclusion as to how Putin solidified power. You point to a series of bombings on apartment buildings in 1999 that killed hundreds of Russians and provided the grounds for the war in Chechnya. Do you think that Moscow was responsible for those?

A: Whether they were directly ordered, whether they were encouraged, I don't think we'll ever know. What is absolutely clear is that the official story about the Ryazan bomb [an attempt thwarted after an observant citizen spotted suspicious activity at his apartment building that turned out to be FSB agents] doesn't make sense — in fact, really stinks. The official version is that two FSB guys from Moscow steal a car, go to Ryazan, buy sugar at a market, buy cartridges, have a detonator with them and plant these sacks in an apartment block — all as a test of anti-terrorist vigilance on the part of the public. It just doesn't add up. Apart from the fact the Chechens have never done anything like it, the authorities were utterly unable to come up with a likely explanation when they were caught by the locals with what appeared be real explosives. So they switched stories and made up this thing about sugar. There's no definitive proof, but the balance of evidence is that the authorities were involved.

Q: You make the case that Russia is currently only a menace to its neighbours, but is on a dangerous trajectory. How do you get the West interested in Russia if its misbehaviour affects only those within the region?

A: It's true that, unlike the last Cold War, this is mainly a European show. What does interest the West is the Baltics, which are now our NATO allies. When members of the [Kremlin-supported] Nashi youth movement blockaded the Estonian embassy [in April 2007] and mobbed the Swedish ambassador's car as it tried to visit, an Estonian diplomat friend of mine described the collective Western response this way: "Oh my goodness, they're attacking white people now!" It made people feel like the Estonians weren't just saying they were in trouble, they actually were in trouble. Likewise, the cyber-attack on Estonia last April got top Western intelligence agencies interested. It was the first time we'd seen a big cyber-attack like that, and it came within a whisker of being quite serious. The other thing that is very important is energy. America is very interested in energy security right now, of getting gas out of the Caspian and trying to break Russia's hold on Central Asia. For that reason alone, I think Russia is of great interest to America.

Q: You do portray Western corporations and stock markets as the Kremlin's enablers, for putting profit and business ahead of the West's new allies. Can you explain why?

A: We've dropped almost all of our standards when it comes to Russian business, and we've got to get back a smell test. I'm all in favour of integrating legitimate businesses into Western stock markets. My problem is with what I call para-statal entities — phony companies like Gazprom, which are basically the oil and gas divisions of Kremlin Inc. and which can't answer questions on ownership and related party transactions in a way that would satisfy a tough regulator in New York. But they're allowed to come to London instead, and I think that's wrong. I secondly worry about the way non-listed companies are able to use Western banks, law firms and accountants to divert money from shareholders of Gazprom and other companies. I think we've completely lost our moral compass.

Q: I think there's confusion in the West, even at the highest political levels, of the degree to which Putin reflects the popular will. If Russians really want what he provides, what can the rest of the world really do?

A: First, one has to pick apart whether he's really doing what Russians want. I think a lot of pro-Putin sentiment is actually anti-Yeltsin, anti-1990s reaction against a ghastly time that we've perhaps underestimated. Secondly, a lot of what appears to be pro-Putin sentiment is actually propaganda staged for television and that sort of thing. Then there's the high price of oil. While on the surface one can say Putin is very popular, one just has to ask if Putin had Yeltsin's oil price and vice versa, what Putin's popularity ranking might be. So I don't think this pro-Putin stuff is completely solid, and I don't think we can abandon the people in Russia to this idea that the country is all about authoritarianism and empire. Russia also has a fantastic history of brave campaigning for human rights and freedom. It's almost racist to say, oh, the Russians don't really want democracy.

Q: Any response out of Russia to your book?

A: The Kremlin and the embassy in London have turned down my publisher's invitations to publicly debate me. Not from official Russia. I do get extremely unpleasant emails, including one that invited me to "come and taste our polonium." A person with thinner skin might be intimidated.

Macedonia, again

Not mad, not bad, just sad
Mar 20th 2008
From Economist.com


The Macedonia name-game

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IF YOU have an unexploded bomb on your doorstep, do not hit it with a hammer, especially if you hear it ticking. That would seem uncontroversial, except when the unexploded bomb is Macedonia and the hammer is wielded by Greece.

Neither side is blameless in the two countries’ tedious wrangle about who can be called what. Ultranationalists of both flavours make absurd claims about the geographical and ethnic characteristics of “historical” Macedonia. If the Olympic games featured an event that measured stubborness and prejudice, the partisans from the Wikipedia talk page dealing with the name wrangle could form a world-class joint team.

Greece’s fears of irridentism from the north are not wholly groundless. But they are out of date and minor compared to the real threat: instability, or worse. The best way to prevent the “Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia” from posing any kind of security threat to its southern neighbour, or stirring up trouble among the slavophone population in the northern Greek province also called Macedonia, is to bring it into the European Union and NATO.

That prospect has also scotched the notion of a Greater Albania, which would have included Kosovo and a large chunk of Macedonia. If borders look set to matter less, that idea will stay dormant.

Membership in the Atlantic alliance has proved a highly effective means of calming old rows (not least between Greece and Turkey). It is hard to argue that Greece will be more secure if it vetoes Macedonia’s NATO membership at the alliance’s summit in Bucharest between April 2nd and 4th, especially if Albania and Croatia gain membership.

America is promoting compromises (Independent Republic of Macedonia, New Republic of Macedonia, Democratic Republic of Macedonia and Constitutional Republic of Macedonia). Greece rejects these, and wants a different qualifier (Upper, Northern, Vardar or Skopje). Macedonia says it will accept an extra label, but not a geographical one.

Macedonia’s impatient-sounding stance and displays of petulance in the past have not always helped its own case, especially in Greek eyes. But a resentful and isolated neighbour will be worse for Greece, not better.

More troublingly, it may blow up. Macedonia’s precarious internal stability is teetering. The coalition government has lost its majority since its Albanian coalition partner pulled out last week; it wants immediate recognition of Kosovo, greater use of the Albanian flag and language, plus pensions for veterans of the insurgency in 2001. Only some prompt and effective international mediation saved that conflict from turning into civil war.

For now, Macedonia has been something of a success story, pushing ahead with fast tax-reform and promoting e-government. That has benefited Greek companies too, who find politics does little or nothing to dent the attractions of northwards trade and investment. Macedonia is already a handy NATO ally, with soldiers in Afghanistan (who, unlike those from some existing members of the alliance, are actually allowed to fight).

A great deal more needs to be done. Infrastructure is dismal, education inadequate, corruption still a problem. But the well-trodden path to membership in the European Union and NATO is the best route for improvement. It if works, it will benefit Greece too.

It may well be that America will bang heads together in the run-up to the NATO summit. But outside attention is a scarce commodity and needed elsewhere too—not least for the vital but chancy business of producing a convincing NATO offer for Georgia and Ukraine.

Greece’s politicians would be doing themselves and everyone else a favour if they would settle the “name issue”—or at least say publicly that they will not veto their northern neighbour from joining an organisation that will make everyone safer and freer.

Interview

This Guest Interview by Bill Steigerwald, columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Mother Russia Is a Bear — An Interview with Edward Lucas

By Bill Steigerwald


Look out for Mother Russia. The nation that emerged from the ruins of communism is not as dangerous to the world or as nasty to its own people as the old Soviet Union. But a new book by Edward Lucas, former Moscow bureau chief of The Economist, warns that Vladimir Putin and the ex-KGB thugs running oil-rich Russia have stifled the freedom of their citizens and turned their country into a menacing bully. I recently talked to Lucas in London by phone about his book “The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West.”

=Q: When you say “the Kremlin is menacing the West” in the title of your United Kingdom edition, who and what do you mean by Kremlin?

=A: When I say “Kremlin,” I mean the ex-KGB people who run Russia. They took piece-by-piece in the 1990s, when the attempt to liquidate the old KGB failed. Mr. Putin came back as prime minister in 1999, when the Yeltsin regime was on its last legs, and then as president in 2000, and that’s really the first time in Russian history that the secret police have actually run the country. That’s had several bad, I would say even deplorable, effects.

Q: Such as?



A: First of all, it’s authoritarianism. We’ve seen the hollowing out and crippling and in some cases the destruction of all the institutions that bring the rule of law and political freedom. The media that really matters, i.e., television, is very closely controlled by the Kremlin. The legislative branch is turned into just a mere sounding board for the executive branch, whereas in the Yeltsin years it was rambunctious and independent if quite corrupt. Although Russians live a great deal better than they used to, because living standards have shot up and life is a lot more stable and predictable, it’s also a lot less free.

Q: What do the Russian people themselves have to fear the most from the Kremlin?

A: The worst legacy of the Putin years is that it stopped Russia from being where it belongs, which is in what one might call “The Greater West.” They’ve darkened Russia’s image abroad so that the country is seen as a corrupt, sinister bully in many eyes. They’ve also failed to create the sort of institutions that you need to have a really modern economy

Q: What do Putin and his gang want? To re-establish the old Soviet Union, exert economic influence over all of Europe, be a superpower again?

A: They certainly don’t want to re-establish the old Soviet Union because they were there when it collapsed and they know it didn’t work. So instead of going for the 100 percent control, which is what the Soviet Union attempted, they are going for 80 percent control. So as long as you control the television, you don’t need to worry about the newspapers, would be one example. They control the commanding heights of the economy but they have no desire to control small business, which was of course illegal in the Soviet Union.

They don’t want to re-conquer Eastern Europe by military means because they know that doesn’t work. But it’s much more effective to use a mixture of energy blackmail and cash. As far as the West is concerned, they want to “finlandize” us — rather as Finland became a kind of neutral, rather impotent country during the Cold War, they want the kind of moral findlandization of the West, where they buy their way into our institutions so that we are no longer able to resist them.

Q: Pat Buchanan and others here would say the West has ticked off Russia by doing things like letting Eastern European countries into NATO. Does Russia have a legitimate reason to be annoyed at us?

A: We have to distinguish between things that Russia is truly and justifiably annoyed about and things which are more manufactured hysterics. Now in terms of threats to Russia’s security, China is far bigger than anything NATO even could do, let alone does. So I think I would discount Russian complaints about that, particularly as it’s the Russian opposition to NATO expansion that’s fueled this. I think where Russia does have a point is on strategic nuclear weapons in space. Russia is still the second power after the United States and this administration has been rather cavalier, to put it mildly, in its treatment of Russia on that. We tore up the ABM treaty and didn’t launch proper talks on a new big treaty on nuclear weapons. It would be in America’s interest to have deep cuts on both sides and rough parity, because dominance in nuclear weapons doesn’t make you safer, it just makes the other guy twitchier and therefore potentially more risky.

Q: What do you think the U.S. or the West should do to show Putin we won’t let him get away with some of this stuff?

A: The most important thing is that we need to regain the moral high ground. We had at the end of the last Cold War great moral authority. Our system not only worked but it was freer and fairer and kinder and more attractive than the Soviet system, which had hit bankruptcy in every way. I think we have lost a lot of that.

Q: What are the consequences if we don’t get on a better footing with Russia?

A: The old Cold War risked nuclear obliteration or the triumph of communist rule internationally, and we’re not facing those. But we are facing the loss of our allies in Eastern Europe, for a start, because Russia is pushing back hard there. We face the end of the Atlantic Alliance, with Europe and America going off in different directions. We face, I think most gravely, this kind of moral findlandization, where Russia by paying the right lobbyists and the right law firms in America or by putting money in the right political parties and paying the right politicians in Europe, pretty much gets what it wants and we lose the self-confidence that we used to have that we live in a free and law-governed society.

Updates

The good guys (Lucas, Shevtsova, Asmus) stormed to victory at the Intelligence Squared debate on March 18th. You can listen again here and read a review here

The debate was particularly interesting for the cynicism displayed towards Ukraine, Poland, Georgia and the Balts by some of the speakers on the other side. If you suffer from high blood pressure and have sympathies with the once-captive nations, be prepared.

A thoughtful review of New Cold War on Itching for Eestima

You can watch a video of my lecture at Brown here

A Flemish (Dutch) language interview in the Standaard here

And you can watch a debate in Nijmegen, The Netherlands (in English) here

A ludicrous "interview" from Lyndon La Rouche's wackos here.

(I particularly like the bit about my "thick British accent")

Baltic conference

On April 17th I will be speaking at a conference in Parnu, Estonia here

Another plug

Ewa Thompson plugs my book in her article about Polish-American relations here

Mini-review in Business Week

You can read it here

New review tls

From The Times Literary Supplement

March 14, 2008

Jaw-jaw in the sauna with Vladimir Putin

Despite high levels of Kremlin criminality, Russia must not be turned into a pariah

Robert Service

Edward Lucas
THE NEW COLD WAR
How the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West
343pp. Bloomsbury. £18.99.
978 0 7475 9567 0

The distinguished British journalist Edward Lucas has produced a firecracker of a book to throw into the growing crowd of Putinophiles. He is a well-qualified commentator on Russia today, and an accomplished linguist. As a foreign correspondent from the 1980s, he reported on Eastern and East-Central Europe when the Soviet Bloc was disintegrating. He pities Russia and the Russians, and one half of The New Cold War is a convincing account of the damage their rulers have done to them. Few recent books range so vividly across the media, courts, pipelines, criminality and Kremlin politics.

Democratic and civil rights are poorly protected in Russia. The Federal Security Bureau, heir to the KGB, was almost certainly involved in the terrorist bombing campaign in autumn 1999 which Vladimir Putin – when he was still only Prime Minister – exploited to restart the war in Chechnya. Scores of investigative journalists, including the author’s friend Anna Politkovskaya, have been assassinated. Television station owners got into trouble for letting their programme-makers object to government policy or ridicule ministers. The big entrepreneurs have been subjected to judicial persecution whenever they defended their private interests against demands by the State. Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, leading “oligarchs” in the Yeltsin period, fled abroad to avoid arrest; Mikhail Khodorkovsky stood his ground only to be put on trial for fraud and incarcerated in eastern Siberia.

The presidential elections of Putin in 2000 and 2004 and of Dmitri Medvedev earlier this month were a charade: individuals who put themselves up against the Kremlin’s candidate were systematically vilified, or prevented from putting their names on the ballot paper. Abroad, Putin has seldom bothered to endear himself. He lectured Western politicians to keep their noses out of Russia and Eastern Europe. Energy prices charged to Ukraine were raised when Kiev began to challenge Russian hegemony. Then, in spring 2007, there was a mysterious blackout of computers in Estonia, and suspicions were strong that the Russian authorities had ordered it. Needless to say, most predictions are that Russia will continue to use its natural resources as an instrument for increasing its influence over all Europe.

Thus far it is hard to challenge the picture given in the book. But difficulties exist right from the start. The title is a problem. Lucas agrees that Russia and the West are not engaged in the titanic struggle that raged between the Soviet Union and the United States from the late 1940s until the end of the 80s. There is little chance that the Russians and Americans will start a world war against each other. The Kremlin no longer propagates a messianic ideology adopted by countries covering a quarter of the world’s land surface. The Russian State no longer rules an empire outside its own territory. International stand-offs such as the Cuba crisis in 1962, when Khrushchev and Kennedy could easily have ordered attacks with nuclear missiles, are unlikely to occur today between Russia and America. Although Lucas concedes all this in his measured introduction, he persists with the terminology of Cold War and cannot help belittling the past and over-inflating the present. Argument is sacrificed for rhetoric.

The New Cold War’s purpose is to sound an alarm about the untoward consequences of allowing Russia to go on behaving badly. The chapters are a polemic against Western politicians and businessmen who turned a blind eye to the bullying tactics used by the Kremlin in Europe during the Putin presidency. The former German Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der typified the corrupted condition of the European approach to Russia. Before coming to power he criticized his predecessor for indulging in “sauna diplomacy”. Then he entered the sauna himself, and was rewarded with a place on the board of Gazprom when he stepped down as Chancellor.

But a bit more shading would have improved the book. The cheap energy prices charged to Ukraine were hardly approvable by any Russian government on a permanent basis. Acting through Gazprom, the Kremlin behaved imperiously and clumsily; but it had a reasonable commercial case that Russia had no obligation to subsidize Ukrainian consumers. The Russian authorities, moreover, have an interest in keeping up a tolerable accord with the countries of the European Union. Export of gas and oil is vital for Russia’s economic buoyancy, and the Europeans are reliable customers: they pay punctually and in full. The projected new pipelines across the North Sea and the Black Sea are extremely costly. Russian business wants them for several reasons. Among them is a desire to avoid the complications of depending on the cooperation of Ukrainian and Belorusian administrations which have not always played entirely fair in supervising the transportation of energy supplies.

Putin’s presidency has coincided with a rise in the world market prices for gas and oil. Like Brezhnev in 1973 (and unlike Gorbachev in the mid-1980s), Putin got lucky. Revenues poured into his coffers. State loans were paid off. Civil servants, doctors and teachers regularly received their salaries; pensions were distributed on time. His popularity soared. Disappointed by the pseudo-democracy of Yeltsin, Russians welcomed a President who at least could impose order and restore pride. President Putin anointed Dmitri Medvedev as his favoured successor in office. Medvedev made speeches committing the government to “national programmes” of improvement in education, housing, health care and agriculture; he also opined that it is no accident that democratic societies have proved to be the most effective in attaining economic success. Little of this appears in The New Cold War. Edward Lucas is surely correct in refusing to take Medvedev’s words at their face value, and in querying any great contrast between Putin and Medvedev. But he takes his analysis several steps too far. By calling for Russia to be expelled from bodies such as the G8 or the Council of Europe, he is proposing a severe quarantine which would make Russia almost as dangerous as he suggests it already is. At the moment, the Russian authorities can be put under some international pressure. If they are turned into pariahs, jaw-jaw will cease, and the Kremlin will have the pretext and freedom to make its bad behaviour still worse.

Robert Service is Professor of Russian History at St Antony’s, Oxford, and Director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre. His most recent publications include Lenin: A Biography (2000), Russia: ExperimStalin: A biography, 2004, and Comrades: A history of world Communism, 2007.

Poland

NB This piece largely written by the excellent but anonymous Economist stringer in Warsaw


Poland's economy

Work in progress

Mar 13th 2008 | WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

The Polish government has a long way to go to get the economy in shape

HIGH hopes, fine words and modest results. That is the story so far of Poland's newish centre-right government, in office since November, as it tries to sort out the country's deep-rooted economic problems in the face of a global slowdown. The previous government, an oddball coalition, frittered away the chances offered by rapid GDP growth (6.5% in 2007) to restructure public finances. Although strong growth in investment and consumption means that the economy is still looking good, competitiveness is suffering as wages grow faster than productivity and the currency appreciates.

The British-born finance minister, Jacek Rostowski, has ambitious-sounding plans to cut the budget deficit until it reaches 1% of GDP in 2011, thus shrinking public debt and preparing for possible entry into the euro area in 2012. But he needs convincing details to match his bold aims. At least Poland is now explicitly aiming to join the euro; the previous government's approach was “wait and see”. Personal income tax will be lower and flatter next year; other taxes will come down too. An economist who follows Poland closely says that the policy goals are “well thought out”, but adds that most reforms are still plans, often vague ones, not reality.

The urgent need is to raise productivity by liberalising the labour market, privatising state-owned enterprises and cutting red tape. Poland's bureaucracy has won a shaming 74th place in a World Bank ranking, behind even Bulgaria and Romania, the EU's newest and poorest members. A parliamentary committee is to examine superfluous regulation. Though little has changed so far, Henryka Bochniarz, head of the private employers' body, praises the government's “real determination” .

The prime minister, Donald Tusk, seems to lack grit. He has caved in to demands for higher wages by border guards and doctors; now the nurses are clamorous. The numbers of public employees able to retire in their 50s have only been shaved. Poland's labour-force participation rate is dire, at around 54%, ten points below the EU average. The government has pledged to boost legal employment by making it easier to set up a business. But it is still far easier in Britain, notes a Polish-based British businessman.

The government flinches at unpopular spending cuts, reflecting feelings in a reform-weary population. The president, Lech Kaczynski, is the twin brother of the former prime minister. He has an eye on re-election in 2010 and he wields a veto over new laws. Without costly deals with the opposition, Mr Tusk lacks the parliamentary majority to overrule him.

Bad relations between prime minister and president have spilled into a row about the central bank, one of the few public institutions trusted by most Poles. The bank's governor is an old friend of Mr Kaczynski's who supports the previous government's doveish monetary policy. That has alarmed inflation hawks (including the former governor) and caused conflict with the bank committee that sets interest rates. In January both deputy governors resigned. One, Krzysztof Rybinski, says that the dispute-ridden atmosphere at the bank has been “demotivating” for all the staff. Mr Tusk has so far refused to approve one of the governor's nominees as deputy. As inflation accelerates past 4%, the uncertainty matters. Higher prices mean higher public-sector wages, further undermining the planned fiscal tightening.

The new Polish government's heart may be in the right place. But it will need more than that if it is to put new Europe's largest economy on track.

Bout at bay

The illegal weapons trade

Suited and booted

Mar 13th 2008
From The Economist print edition

A notorious arms dealer is arrested in Thailand. Why?

Reuters

Bout: on the other foot now

A FORMER Soviet military-intelligence officer, stranded in Africa by the collapse of his country, turns to gun-running and builds a lucrative international business. It is the sort of outfit that thrives on pointless wars in failed, dirt-poor places. But it also plays a part in some bigger conflicts. Its list of past customers includes the world's best-known terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and Colombia's FARC—and Western governments too. Efforts to round up the man at the centre of this web are frustrated, sometimes by bad luck, and sometimes apparently by squabbles in the rich world between those who want to prosecute and those who protect him.

That, broadly, is the critics' account of the career of Viktor Bout, once a Soviet “military translator” in Africa, fluent in six languages, the founder of numerous controversial freight businesses, and now the inmate of a police cell in Thailand, where he was detained on March 6th in a sting operation. Mr Bout says he was on holiday. An extradition affidavit filed by an agent of America's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Robert Zachariasiewicz, says Mr Bout was lured from his home in Moscow to Thailand by people posing as FARC representatives, wanting to buy weapons for a $5m commission. America says it will seek his extradition. On March 10th Mr Bout's British associate, Andrew Smulian, was charged in New York with conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist organisation.

Quite why Mr Bout has now fallen into the clutches of the international justice system is still unclear. Previous attempts to nab him have fallen foul of Western disunity. Clinton-era efforts fizzled out during the Bush administration. Belgian and British attempts to arrest him seem to have been leaked (some blame America for that). Mr Bout appears to have been a useful contractor for American forces in Iraq, and to have trafficked arms to American-backed causes elsewhere. That may have endeared him to the Pentagon, even as the DEA and other agencies were hunting him on other grounds.

Some, such as Louise Shelley, an American academic who researches international organised crime, link Mr Bout's arrest to a broader change in Russia. Semyon Mogilevich, a Moscow-based businessman long wanted by Interpol, was arrested there on January 24th on tax-evasion charges. On March 12th Russia also agreed to extradite to Colombia an Israeli mercenary, Yair Gal Klein, who was arrested late last year in Moscow. He is accused of training FARC guerrillas. But sceptics think any change in Russian co-operation with global law enforcement is cosmetic: “Handing over a couple of ageing arms dealers is a small price,” says one, noting strong Russian involvement in Colombia in the past, such as building a submarine for cocaine smuggling.

It is unclear if Mr Bout will ever reach the dock in America. Some who have followed his career closely think he will use “greymail”: threatening to expose American secrets. The authorities may prefer to have him spill the beans on something else—perhaps his shadowy backers in the Russian arms-export business—than to risk putting him on trial.

Even more puzzling is why Mr Bout ventured to Thailand at all. Mr Zachariasiewicz's affidavit paints a picture of a man both greedy and careless in pursuit of a smallish deal—implausible for those who believe Mr Bout to have been a meticulous planner with a vast fortune.

But the biggest question of all is what Mr Bout represents. In one sense he was a dinosaur: the product of the Soviet collapse and the opportunities it provided in the form of plentiful cheap weapons and aircraft, highly trained men at a loose end, and weak law enforcement. Those conditions are unlikely to be repeated (though a close reading of the DEA affidavit suggests, alarmingly, that Mr Bout thought Bulgaria was the ideal place in which to trans-ship advanced surface-to-air missiles).

If true, his alleged activities could also portend a future in which global criminal entrepreneurs disguise illegal businesses (such as drug- and gun-running) within legal ones (air freight), playing off Western governments and their agencies against each other, and using offshore companies and weak legal systems to keep their activities impenetrable. It is easy to imagine such villainy staying ahead of the stumbling efforts of national criminal-justice systems. At least for a time.

Belarus

Europe.view

Heart of darkness

Mar 13th 2008
From Economist.com

A ray of hope from Belarusian exiles

Get article background

LIKE a stub of candle, even a small bit of history is a comfort when you are in a dark room. Belarus looks pretty gloomy under Alyaksandr Lukashenka. An earthy collective-farm manager, he won the last freely contested election in 1994 against a representative of the old Soviet nomenklatura.

Many people (including your columnist) thought that any change was bound to be for the better. It wasn’t. The new regime pioneered the kind of authoritarian rule, bombastic and occasionally murderous, that has now spread to Russia. In retrospect, 1990-94 looks like the heyday of Belarussian freedom.

With one exception. For a few months in 1918, Belarus enjoyed its first fragile taste of independence. As the Soviet regime consolidated its hold, the government fled, first to Lithuania, then to Prague.

The 90th anniversary of that first proclamation of statehood is on March 25th. It will be celebrated by both the opposition in Belarus and by the Belarusian National Rada (BNR), an émigré assembly and government-in-exile that has doggedly maintained a vestigial existence for the past nine decades. From the authorities’ point of view there is nothing to celebrate. Belarus was from the beginning a Soviet Socialist Republic, part of the great Soviet Union. Any suggestion to the contrary is bourgeois nationalist claptrap.

The idea of maintaining loyalty to a country that even nonagenarians would not remember might seem impossibly quixotic. But experience suggests that when governments-in-exile keep going, history rewards them.

The Polish government-in-exile, marooned in London after the war, was welcomed back to Poland when communism fell to present the newly elected Lech Walesa with the presidential insignia. The “People’s Poland” imposed at gunpoint by the Soviets was revealed for the sham it had always been. The exile government’s presidents—stalwart members of the suburban Polish émigré community in London—are now officially recognised as former heads of state.

East Timor’s government-in-exile returned home victorious when the Indonesian occupation ended. Exiled politicians and diplomats from the Baltic states came home happily too.

The danger is to wind up too soon. Ukraine’s émigré leaders declared victory rather promptly in 1991. The Belarusians, wisely in retrospect, decided to wait and see. The BNR now presents a poignant symbolic challenge to the regime at home, and is a focus of unity for the opposition.

Slowly, real-world politicians are beginning to take it more seriously. The BNR’s president, a personable Canadian artist named Ivonka Survilla, is in Strasbourg this week to be formally received at the European Parliament, along with a bevy of Belarusians from both the diaspora and the domestic opposition. The BNR, normally secretive for fear of endangering its members in the homeland, has issued a public statement urging the outside world not to forget the Belarusian cause, and to protect those inside the country who want to celebrate the anniversary.

Politics seems to be thawing a bit inside Belarus too. The regime has responded to feelers put out by European countries, including Poland, and has released almost all political prisoners. Only one remains: Alyaksandr Kazulin, an outspoken figure who seems to have attracted Mr Lukashenka’s personal ire. American sanctions on a big Belarusian company, Belneftekhim, seem to have bitten hard too. The tempestuous Mr Lukashenka abruptly expelled the American ambassador last week.

Mr Lukashenka has flirted with the West before and it would be too early to declare a change of heart. But whether because of the country’s economic plight (Russia is driving a much harder bargain on gas) or for some other reason, some rusty wheels are in motion. The BNR’s loyal supporters hope that theirs may turn too.

new cold war reviews

A long interview (in English) for a Lithuanian website here


A comprehensive review on Pajamas media of my book and another by Kim Zigfeld, the pseudonymous founder of La Russophobe here



Long interview (in Lithuanian) here

And in Romanian here


3000 words by me in Dutch neocon weekly here

Wikileaks

The internet and government

Leaks and lawsuits

Mar 6th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Lawyers and governments battle over free speech on the internet

BEFORE they were leaked onto the internet, the activities in the Cayman Islands of Bank Julius Baer, and how far they may or may not have been approved by the tax authorities in the bank's native Switzerland, were strictly confidential. Even after a disgruntled senior executive posted some rum-sounding details to Wikileaks, a website specialising in information provided by whistle-blowers, they would have remained obscure. But the bank's attempts to have Wikileaks shut down have brought exactly the sort of scrutiny that it had shunned.

The bank now says it is considering its position. But the legal battles in California have highlighted both the legal limbo in cyberspace, and the way that the evolution of the web is widening the gap between those that want to share information (even illegally) and lawyers and governments that may want to control it.

Wikileaks appears to have been founded by an Australian living in Kenya. It boasts a distinguished advisory board, featuring both cryptographers and pro-democracy activists from such places as China. It offers “military-strength” encryption for those wanting to upload files anonymously. Material is reviewed by journalists and lawyers and then put on the web for public discussion. Big recent scoops have included an operating manual for guards at the American internment camp at Guantánamo, a document relating to the British government's expensive rescue of Northern Rock, a troubled bank, and material relating to official corruption in Kenya.

Working out where to sue it is tricky. Wikileaks has no offices or legal presence. Its servers are in Sweden and Belgium: countries, its website says, that offer strong legal protection. An initial American court ruling removed wikileaks.org from the internet domain registry, making it harder to find. But on February 29th the same judge reversed his ruling, to the delight of a bevy of free-speech advocates.

Websites that can be edited by anybody anywhere, part of what is often termed Web 2.0, are a powerful tool for political and social protest. In Colombia, protesters against FARC, a guerrilla group, used Facebook to organise a 4m-strong demonstration. Google Maps allowed a few bright Kenyan bloggers to display the incidence of post-election violence reported by text message. Russian bloggers have mobilised on LiveJournal to expose corruption at a pharmaceutical company.

But the golden age of cyberactivism may be coming to an end. China restricts access to anything with a Tibetan or pro-democracy flavour. Turkey blocked access to sites on Wordpress, a popular blogging platform, because it hosted material critical of Kemal Ataturk, the revered founder of the secular republic. Muslim countries, worried about the way in which the internet undermines conservative social mores on nudity and mingling, are twitchy too. Sites such as YouTube or even Craigslist, which offers an online dating service among a myriad of innocuous free-of-charge classified advertisements, are often banned in whole or in part.

Filtering out specific content from such sites is the subtlest but most expensive means of maintaining control. A simpler but more controversial approach is to block an entire domain. Inexpert official intervention can easily backfire. In Pakistan earlier this year the authorities (inadvertently, they claim) briefly made YouTube, a popular video-sharing site, inaccessible even for users abroad. A big fan of the site is none other than the country's president, Pervez Musharraf. According to Techcrunch, a technology blog, he was a conspicuously frequent visitor to a facility at Davos, a plutocratic Swiss shindig, where summit-goers could answer questions posed by YouTube users.

Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard internet guru, says that authoritarian regimes find it harder to block such general sites as YouTube than to block those run by a specific group (Human Rights Watch, for example). The second lot appeals solely to dissidents, whereas the first are useful to many more internet users who are interested in apolitical subjects.

But Michael Anti, a Chinese free-speech advocate, fears that state and commercial interests are colluding to produce Web 2.0 products that are apolitical but attractive. The convenience of China's Tudou and Baidu makes them strong competitors to foreign rivals like YouTube and Google. That makes an outright ban on the foreign sites less thorny.

To counter this, Chinese activists are returning to older, decentralised, internet services such as e-mail and chat rooms. These may be safer, but they have little reach outside the dissenting elite. Maybe netizens are too busy enjoying the new social and cultural freedoms offered by the internet to care about politics.

visas

American visas

Stand in line

Mar 6th 2008 | PRAGUE
From The Economist print edition

A docile ally wins visa-free travel to America. Others fume

RISKING death alongside American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan makes you a valued ally—unless, that is, you actually want to visit the United States. Then you are a security risk and have to pay a hefty fee for a visa that you may not be granted. That is the bitter experience of loyal Atlanticists in eastern Europe, who have been waiting for America's visa regime to lift ever since the iron curtain fell.

Almost all “old” Europeans (ie, the richer part of the continent) benefit from America's visa-waiver programme; Greece is the only exception. That includes countries that have criticised American foreign policy and those with large Muslim minorities (a security risk in American eyes). Many ex-communist countries have demonstrated their pro-American loyalties on the battlefield. Poland and the Czech Republic, moreover, are the planned sites for two new American missile-defence installations, prompting wrath from Russia. Yet so far only Slovenia (exceptionally small, rich and well-run) has gained visa-free travel to America.

Now the Czech government seems to have done a deal that will make life easier for its America-bound citizens. In doing so it has infuriated the rest of Europe, especially Poland. Visiting Washington, DC, last week the prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, signed a memorandum of understanding that will allow Czechs to apply for a visa waiver online, skipping both the embassy queues and the $131 fee. It has also agreed to plentiful data-sharing with American officialdom, and that American armed marshals may fly on Czech flights. Similar deals with other countries such as Estonia are expected.

This has infuriated the European Commission, which badly wants to be the sole negotiator with the Americans. Special deals for selected ex-communist countries will undermine that. Oddly, America repeatedly urges Europe to adopt a stronger and more united stance in the face of Russian attempts to do bilateral deals on energy. But on the question of visas, America appears happy to adopt a similar divide-and-rule tactic itself.

The Poles are privately livid. The new government in Warsaw has been trying hard to bargain for better terms with America on both missile defences and visas. “The bouncing Czechs have stabbed us in the back,” says an official, bitterly mixing his metaphors.

Lazy language

Europe.view

Straight talk

Mar 6th 2008
From Economist.com

Words to avoid, from A to Z

THE lazy use of shorthand and cliché are not unique to discussion of the ex-communist world. But here is an alphabet of words that are overused and under-explained.

A is for anti-Western (usually equalling anti-American). This is automatically bad, regardless of rich-world blunders, hypocrisies or arrogance. Reasonable objections to dubious outside advice, misdirected money, or missile-defence schemes can all be smeared in this way.

B is for bureaucratic, a good way of criticising east European standards of public administration according to a notional western standard somewhere between Finland and perfection (see “world”, below).

C is for clannish, or cronyism. Useful words to convey the idea of criminal behaviour or corruption without having to nail down the facts clearly enough to satisfy English libel standards (see “murky”).

D is for dreary. Often accompanied by “communist-era”. Anything you find aesthetically displeasing.

E is for Euro-Atlantic, a synonym for “good” and shorthand for wanting to join NATO and the European Union.

F is for flashy. Some east Europeans have more money and less taste than is good for them.

G is for go-ahead. A general term of praise for someone who ignores public opinion and constitutional niceties in pursuit of change of which you approve. Often accompanied by descriptions of the subject’s use of an iPhone or BlackBerry.

H is for heavy-handed. Any government action that is disliked for unspecific reasons (see “tough” below).

I is for instructive. A favourite particular can be generalised if it is thus described.

J is for jovial. Drunken, even by the standards of the region, but good (see “convivial”).

K is for kleptocracy. A useful if rather grand synonym for “corruption”.

L is for liberal-minded. Someone who ostentatiously prefers foreigners to compatriots as conversation partners.

M is for migration. The hottest topic right now in Europe, but should be applied only to the east-to-west variety. British pensioners buying holiday homes in Bulgaria do not count as migrants.

N is for narod. This Russian word meaning “people” can be bandied about, giving the vague impression that you spend your evenings reading Dostoevsky in the original.

O is for out-dated. Another good boo-word. Nothing in western Europe is outdated, but many things behind the former Iron Curtain fit the description exactly.

P is for populism. Ideas that are evil but troublingly popular.

Q is for quiescent. Useful for expressing impatience with voters (see “narod”, above) for putting up with things and people that you disapprove of (see “damaging”).

R is for reformer. Anything from an authoritarian moderniser to a wimpy xenophile. Can still be used as a synonym for “honest” and “competent”, despite little factual evidence to suggest the connection.

S is for steely. Anyone dislikeable, unemotional, and with a KGB background.

T is for tough. Breaking rules and ignoring critics, but for reasons that you approve of.

U is for upset. Anything that you failed to predict.

V is for virtual—a useful way of sounding clever and disparaging, as in “Russia has a virtual economy run by a virtual government”. Now slightly out of date.

W is for the world. A loose but useful term. “Unlike in the rest of the world” actually means “unlike in a composite of the United States, Germany and Finland”. Much of the ex-communist world is actually very like the rest of the world: poor and badly governed.

X is for eXtremist. A bad word meaning people who promote an unpleasant minority viewpoint. Unless they win an election (then see “damaging”).

Y is for yearning. Something people ought to want but don’t express effectively (see “quiescent”, above).

Z is for zealous (see “tough”, above).

NBC Nightly News

interviewed me here

New Cold War latest

I am interviewed in Poland's Dziennik newspaper here

And interviewed on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty here (transcript in Russian)

New Cold War

I am interviewed in Spanish here

And assailed by the Exile (Moscow's English-language satirical paper) here

You can hear me discussing the book in (heavily-accented) Russian here

A review by my former colleague, and now blogger Stephen Hugh Jones here

You can hear an interview on NPR here (though it was edited to make me sound much less hawkish than I am)

And this piece (abbreviated) ran in today's Sunday Telegraph

What hope for reform under Medvedev?

By Edward Lucas

Last Updated: 12:30am GMT 02/03/2008

To call it an election is insulting to countries that have real ones. Russia's political event today, in which Dmitri Medvedev, the lawyerly sidekick of Vladimir Putin, will romp home against token opposition, is both predictable and mystifying. Everyone knows who will win. But nobody knows what it means.

For Russia's political system is not only closed to real competition; it is also all but impenetrable to outsiders.

We are back to the era of Kremlinology, when analysts of Soviet politics would scrutinise every nuance in Pravda for faint reflections of the power struggles in the Communist Party's politburo.

For all its faults, Russia's political system under Boris Yeltsin was both open and unpredictable. Would the president be impeached? [You could] phone a powerful Russian politician or top tycoon and find out.

Now things are different. Kremlinology - which only a few years ago seemed to be an obsolete skill - is back. Russians and outsiders alike are reduced to reading the tea leaves.

How seriously should we take Dmitry Medvedev's reformist rhetoric? If he is sincere, does he have a chance of making it happen? Will real power rest with Mr Putin, or will it be shared? If so, will that double act, the first of its kind in Russian history, be stable?

We are told that Mr Medvedev is a pro-Western liberal, on the grounds that he likes rock music and the internet. Maybe he is. Or maybe he is the preferred candidate of the former-KGB people who seized power in Russia in 1999, and who want to put a presentable face on a system that has made them multi-billionaires.

Rather than using the mental equivalent of a flint axe to cut our way through the jungle of Russian politics, it may be more helpful to think in terms of films. The fundamental question is, are we watching Casablanca or Gone with the Wind?

Believe the latter, and today's poll is part of a carefully scripted melodrama in which the audience may be in suspense, but the actors know the ending. Mr Putin has neatly sidestepped the two-term limit stipulated in the Russian constitution, but achieves his other objectives, chiefly a speedy return to power in a few months or years.

The script ties up lots of other loose ends, too. The youthful and soft-spoken Mr Medvedev will repair an international image scarred by the hawkish rhetoric coming from Russia in recent years.

The intricate networks of power, money and personal favours that make Russia work may twitch, but will not be ripped apart. Russia's secret-police tycoons will continue to run the country, squashing public protest and making haphazard stabs at reform.

And cinema-goers, hoping to see their favourite characters in action again, will flock to the sequel, starring a "positively final appearance, due to overwhelming public demand" by Mr Putin, the man Mr Medvedev has served so faithfully for 16 years.

As so often in the past eight years, Russia's rulers will have preserved the letter of legality and political propriety, while trampling on the spirit.

The Russian people cannot possibly be trusted to make a real choice between real candidates in a free election. Instead, it must all be carefully stage-managed and scripted. The pay-off line is simple: "Democracy my dear? Frankly, I don't give a damn."

But suppose this political epic is not neatly plotted but hurriedly improvised - more like Casablanca, where for most of the film's production Humphrey Bogart (Rick) and Paul Heinried (Victor László) had no idea who was going to end up in the arms of Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa) at the airport.

On this reading, the choice of Medvedev was a desperate stop-gap move, the product of unmanageable feuding among the Kremlin clans. His election may give a glimmer of hope to the beleaguered economic reformers in Russia's government. It might even mean the sidelining of the incompetent ex-spooks who infest the heights of political and economic power.

That would truly be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

•Edward Lucas is a former Moscow bureau chief of 'The Economist' and author of 'The New Cold War: how the Kremlin menaces Russia and the West' (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

FT review

...by the excellent Stefan Wagstyl can be found here

If you read German...

you may find this interesting, from the Sueddeutsche Zeitung