Estonia under cyber-attack

Estonia and Russia

A cyber-riot
May 10th 2007
From The Economist print edition


Estonia has faced down Russian rioters. But its websites are still under attack

FOR a small, high-tech country such as Estonia, the internet is vital. But for the past two weeks Estonia's state websites (and some private ones) have been hit by “denial of service” attacks, in which a target site is bombarded with so many bogus requests for information that it crashes.

The internet warfare broke out on April 27th, amid a furious row between Estonia and Russia over the removal of a Soviet war monument from the centre of the capital, Tallinn, to a military cemetery (pictured below). The move sparked rioting and looting by several thousand protesters from Estonia's large population of ethnic Russians, who tend to see the statue as a cherished memorial to wartime sacrifice. Estonians mostly see it rather as a symbol of a hated foreign occupation.

The unrest, Estonia says, was orchestrated by Russia, which termed the relocation “blasphemy” and called for the government's resignation. In Moscow, a Kremlin-run youth movement sealed off and attacked Estonia's embassy, prompting protests from America, NATO and the European Union. Perhaps taken aback by the belated but firm Western support for Estonia, Russia has backpedalled. Following a deal brokered by Germany, Estonia's ambassador left for a “holiday” and the blockade ended as abruptly as it began.

But the internet attacks have continued. Some have involved defacing Estonian websites, replacing the pages with Russian propaganda or bogus apologies. Most have concentrated on shutting them down. The attacks are intensifying. The number on May 9th—the day when Russia and its allies commemorate Hitler's defeat in Europe—was the biggest yet, says Hillar Aarelaid, who runs Estonia's cyber-warfare defences. At least six sites were all but inaccessible, including those of the foreign and justice ministries. Such stunts happen at the murkier end of internet commerce: for instance, to extort money from an online casino. But no country has experienced anything on this scale.

The alarm is sounding well beyond Estonia. NATO has been paying special attention. “If a member state's communications centre is attacked with a missile, you call it an act of war. So what do you call it if the same installation is disabled with a cyber-attack?” asks a senior official in Brussels. Estonia's defence ministry goes further: a spokesman compares the attacks to those launched against America on September 11th 2001. Two of NATO's top specialists in internet warfare, plus an American colleague, have hurried to Tallinn to observe the onslaught. But international law is of little help, complains Rein Lang, Estonia's justice minister.

The crudest attacks come with the culprit's electronic fingerprints. The Estonians say that some of the earliest salvoes came from computers linked to the Russian government. But most of them come from many thousands of ordinary computers, all over the world. Some of these are run by private citizens angry with Estonia. Anonymously posted instructions on how to launch denial-of-service attacks have been sprouting on Russian-language internet sites. Many others come from “botnets”—chains of computers that have been hijacked by viruses to take part in such raids without their owners knowing. Such botnets can be created, or simply rented from cyber-criminals.

To remain open to local users, Estonia has had to cut access to its sites from abroad. That is potentially more damaging to the country's economy than the limited Russian sanctions announced so far, such as cutting passenger rail services between Tallinn and St Petersburg. It certainly hampers Estonia's efforts to counter Russian propaganda that portrays the country as a fascist hellhole. “We are back to the stone age, telling the world what is going on with phone and fax,” says an Estonian internet expert. Mikko Hyppönen of F-Secure, a Finnish internet security company that has been monitoring the attacks, says the best defence is to have strong networks of servers in many countries. That is not yet NATO's job. But it may be soon.

Rostropovich obituary

Mstislav Rostropovich

May 10th 2007
From The Economist print edition

“Slava” Rostropovich, the world's greatest cellist, died on April 27th, aged 80

Lebrecht

MUSIC, under totalitarianism, was one of the great escapes. The most vicious secret policeman could not wholly curb the human spirit once it moved into the world of sounds. “Slava” Rostropovich (the diminutive of his Christian name means “glory” in Russian) used to the utmost the freedom that music gave him inside the Soviet Union. When forced to move abroad, he became the ambassador of free Russian culture to the world, doing in music what Alexander Solzhenitsyn did, more gloomily, in words.

He was present at the two defining moments of the collapse of communism, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 (when he played Bach suites all night by a breach between the concrete blocks), and the attempted hardline putsch in Moscow in August 1991. On that occasion he talked his way into the Soviet Union without a visa to stand, rifle gingerly in hand, with Boris Yeltsin in the besieged Russian parliament. Its defenders claimed his presence stopped the putschists storming the building. He would have been happy to die there, he said, on the “most important, dangerous and emotional day of my life”.

In the 17 years before that, apart from one visit with the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, DC, he had not set foot in his own country. His defiance began when his two greatest teachers, Sergei Prokofiev and, chiefly, Dmitri Shostakovich, fell out of official favour. A cannier Soviet citizen might have dumped or denounced them, but Mr Rostropovich refused to do so. For a time, his glittering musical talents protected him. Other artists and intellectuals, however, were silent in his defence, and his friendship with Mr Solzhenitsyn was the last straw. In 1969 the writer, persecuted by the authorities, had nowhere to live; Mr Rostropovich invited him to stay. Then he, his wife Galina and some other brave souls wrote an open letter to the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, protesting at the regime's abuse of cultural freedom.

After that, Mr Rostropovich was on the blacklist. He became a prisoner in his own country, ignored by the state-controlled media, unable to play in public or make recordings. He was stripped of his musical awards, and his name was even removed from the many scores that had been dedicated to him. Though Russia was “in my heart—in my mind”, and ever would be, in 1974 he asked to be allowed to leave. His citizenship was revoked four years later.

He had been adored in the West since his first visit in 1956, frequently performing at the Aldeburgh festival and becoming close friends with its towering talent, Benjamin Britten. The two communicated in broken German, which they called “Aldeburgh Deutsch”; Britten wrote cello suites, a sonata and a symphony for him. In exile Mr Rostropovich learnt English, or at least developed an idiosyncratic version of it. But he lost none of his Russianness, greeting friends with a massive bear hug. After Britten died, Mr Rostropovich would hug his tomb when visiting Aldeburgh.

Hearing his own voice

Off-duty, he was an assiduous socialite. In London, Washington or Paris he was glad to mix with the appreciative, anything in stockings and (especially, jealous critics said) the famous. But his main energies went to music. He would rise at five, study scores for three hours, relax after a concert with a four-hour practice session. Such discipline had been inculcated from childhood, when he had studied the cello with his father at their home in Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan. At 13, he would hang flatbread from the ceiling-lamp so that he could snatch swaying mouthfuls as he played. And when, as a young man, he thought he might be allowed to premiere Shostakovich's first cello concerto, he practised for ten hours a day.

He played the piano too—his first instrument, on which he had been coached by his mother from the age of four—and was accomplished enough to accompany his wife, a soprano, in her recitals. He conducted, though his sessions had a mixed press: sometimes clumsy and lacking in fireworks, sometimes inspirational, with an unmatched ability to communicate his profound understanding of the music to the orchestra. When contemporary composers played through their pieces for him, he said, he would watch their faces, and try to pass their feelings on.

As a performer, he combined extraordinary technical virtuosity with a sublimely confident and passionate interpretation of the music's melodic line. His sound was as huge as his humanity. When his interpretations departed a bit from the printed score, few complained: the music was enriched, not merely transmitted, through his playing. He had fallen in love with the cello in the first place, he explained, because it seemed to be his own voice. But the music he heard in his head as he played was “symphonic”, far surpassing even the sound of the instrument he embraced.

Perhaps his most memorable performance was of Dvorak's cello concerto, in London in September 1968, just after the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia that crushed the Prague Spring. Protesters outside the Royal Albert Hall were cross that a “Soviet” concert was going ahead. But Mr Rostropovich wept for his country's crimes and its captives' suffering, and so did those who heard him.

book review

Swimming pools

At the deep end
May 10th 2007
From The Economist print edition



Contested Waters: A Social History of Swimming Pools in America
By Jeff Wiltse



University of North Carolina Press; 276 pages; $29.95 and £18.50


FROM cleanliness to sociability to athleticism, swimming baths are a symbol of life in America. Jeff Wiltse unpicks a story that begins in an age when the main reason for public pools was to let poor people get clean. In the days before chlorination that created problems: a swimming pool in New York's Central Park would attract “all sorts of undesirable people”, said the parks commissioner. If it was “used by all classes” said the New York Times in 1910, “it will become foul in a very short time”.



Public swimming pools soon became a touchstone of municipal social reform. But two other kinds of prejudice took over. The first was against the mixing of lightly clad men and women, which could encourage lewdness and promiscuity. That gradually eroded. By the mid-1930s, “bathing costumes” designed to conceal curves and bulges were giving way to “swimsuits” designed for practicality or even, excitingly, to showcase the body.

But as sexual taboos were breaking down, another set was growing, conflating prudishness, paranoia and straight racism. The book starts with a poignant story from 1951 of a victorious children's baseball team that wanted to celebrate by swimming at a municipal pool in Youngstown, Ohio. But one team member, Al Bright, was black. Initially the pool attendants denied him admittance. After many protests, the supervisor relented. The “negro” was allowed to enter the pool so long as all other swimmers left the water, and he sat on a rubber raft. As his teammates looked on, a life-guard pushed him once round the pool, reminding him, “whatever you do, don't touch the water.”

Racial integration came slowly but municipalities had lost their appetite for pool-building. Washington, DC, and New York City built 19 pools between them during the 1930s, but none at all between 1945 and 1960. The middle classes were getting their own pools in their backyards and attendance at public baths was falling. Why spend money on a service that only a few poor people used?

The eruption of America's inner cities in the years between 1964 and 1968 gave a compelling answer to that. Most of the 329 “black riots” of the time took place during the hot steamy nights of high summer. One of the most famous, in Chicago, started after teenagers were stopped from bathing in a fire hydrant they had opened. In the three days of rioting that followed, three people were killed and 300 arrested. The federal government splurged money on pool-building: New York City alone built 30 pools in the two years after 1966, and 84 by 1971.

It was a short-lived renaissance. Many northern cities ran out of money; pool managers faced new problems, including violence and vandalism. Americans turned to private pools, building 3m since 1970. A pity, in Mr Wiltse's nostalgic view. For all the pools' unfulfilled promise as social and ethnic levellers, there was nothing like a family swimming outing to leave a vivid childhood memory.

Russia's blunder, Estonia's recovery

Europe.view

How to fight back

May 10th 2007
From Economist.com

Responding to Russia’s inept bullying

Get article background

IT HAS been a depressing couple of weeks for those who worry about Russian imperialism and sympathise with the underdog. But it has not been entirely hopeless. Things started off badly: Estonia’s decision to move a Soviet-era war memorial from a prominent spot in Tallinn to a military cemetery at the end of April aroused hostile passions among Russians and their sympathisers, and drew alarmingly muted and belated support from Estonia’s allies. All four of the big European countries—Britain, France, Germany and Italy—said little or nothing. NATO and the European Union waited until Russia had, as usual, undermined its position by grossly over-reacting. America came up trumps in the end, inviting Estonia’s president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, to the White House—but the invitation could have come a week earlier.

Others sided outright with the Kremlin. Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who now chairs a Russian-German gas pipeline, said Estonia had contradicted “every form of civilised behaviour”. Given that at the time of his comment thugs were blockading—and threatening to dismantle—Estonia’s embassy in Moscow, it would be interesting to know Mr Schröder’s definition of “civilised”.

But there have also been some rather encouraging signs. The Estonians, who had been leaning towards taking a share in Mr Schröder’s pipeline, abruptly cancelled his planned visit to Tallinn.

Some of Russia’s best independent journalists, initially wrongfooted by Estonia’s bungled handling of the issue, have been putting the other side of the story.

Natalya Gevorkyan on Gazeta.ru, a Russian news site, pointed out the extraordinary hypocrisy in the Soviet Union’s wartime myths—not least in the shameful treatment of disabled veterans. Why does Russia kick up a fuss about minor issues, such as the monument, and ignore bigger ones? Yuliya Latynina on Ekho Moskvy, Russia’s only independent radio station, suggested that the fracas over Estonia was a dry run for some imminent bigger and nastier stunt that will give Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, a pretext to ignore the constitution and stay in power.

DIMITAR DILKOFF/AFP

Also heartening is that, after an initial burst of government panic, Estonia seems to be getting its own public-relations act together. Someone has coined the phrase “Nashism” to describe the authoritarian populist (ie, fascist) philosophy of the Kremlin-run youth movement, “Nashi” (“Ours”). After a fortnight in which Estonia’s enemies made clever use of the cheap jibe that the country is oozing with nostalgia for the Waffen SS by spelling the country’s name as eSStonia, the president’s surname as IlveSS and the prime minister’s as AnSSip, it is encouraging to see a counter-attack. Having leapfrogged into the internet age, and with a high level of competence in both English and Russian, few countries are better placed than Estonia to fight a propaganda war in cyberspace.

Estonia’s biggest advantage is Russia’s stupidity. Had the demonstrators in Tallinn pitched a peaceful tent city round the war memorial’s original location, aping the tactics of the “Orange Revolution” in Kiev, the Estonian police would have risked looking heavy-handed when they cleared it away. But instead, the assembled riff-raff quickly dropped the boring business of political protest in favour of smashing windows, looting shops, destroying “fascist bus shelters” and revelling in other acts of hooliganism. That blurred hopelessly the image that the Russian spooks in Tallinn had hoped to get across: of peaceful, idealistic young people standing up for their rights.

Crashing the Estonian government’s servers by swamping them with millions of bogus clicks may have also seemed like a good idea at the time. But the result has been to alarm NATO, which is now drawing on Estonian computer geeks’ expertise in dealing with possible threats elsewhere.

Russia remains a rather ineffective bully. But the unsettling question remains—not just for Estonia, Georgia and Poland, but for everyone—what happens if once, just once, Russia played its cards wisely and well?

book review: air hostesses

Flight attendants

Skivvies of the sky
May 3rd 2007
From The Economist print edition



Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants
By Kathleen M. Barry



Duke University Press; 328 pages; $22.95 and £13.99

THINK of international air travel these days and it is a fair bet that glamour and luxury, let alone sex, do not leap to mind. But for decades, airlines in America and elsewhere used carefully selected, perfectly groomed young women to persuade their mainly male customers that sitting in cramped aluminium tins for hours at a stretch was a pleasurable experience. Terrorism was the last straw but it was really technology that destroyed the illusion. Once the jet engine allowed mass air travel, pampering and soothing stopped and the whiff of romance became an advertising copywriter's fiction.

Kathleen Barry's history of how gracious stewardesses turned into sexy air hostesses and then into tough, grumpy flight attendants tries hard to be dull, but thankfully does not quite succeed.

It is striking, and shameful, that women had to leave their jobs once they married, were often subject to snap underwear inspections and had to retire at 32. Wise readers will skip the exhaustive descriptions of the trade-union politics that these indignities prompted.

Much more interesting is the way in which the status and reputation of cabin crews mirrored other social changes. In the swinging sixties, a book called “Coffee, Tea or Me?”, which sold more than 1m copies, supposedly chronicled the sexual adventures of young women liberated by contraception and a huge choice of partners (in fact, the pseudonymous author turned out to be a male airline publicist). Airline advertisements, such as Continental's “We really move our tails for you”, seem impossibly lewd to modern eyes. Some airlines expected their female staff to wear outfits including miniskirts, wet-look vinyl, fishnet stockings, hotpants and the like: after all, if the customers weren't happy, they would soon go elsewhere.

After much huffing and puffing from an increasingly unionised and feminist workforce, American airlines largely dropped all this nonsense. Nowadays, flight attendants highlight their role as safety professionals, able to open the aircraft's doors manually, underwater and in the dark.

Ms Barry's book is written from a narrowly national perspective, her view of industrial relations rooted in the adversarial American approach. It would have been interesting to have learned how things changed in the more consensual context of Scandinavian and German trade unionism. And she ignores the way in which Asian airlines still highlight the demure charms of their cabin crew.

The book leaves a sense of nostalgia in its wake. Female cabin crew may have higher formal status and are less likely to have their bottoms pinched (by customers or colleagues). But their job has become both harder and drearier: waitressing in the sky, to diners infantilised by rules and behaviour codes. The result is a polite conspiracy in which both servers and served try to pretend to each other that flying is not quite as ghastly as it truly is.

news article on Estonia from this week's Economist

Estonia

Bronze meddling

May 3rd 2007
From The Economist print edition

Russian hypocrisy and heavy-handedness towards a former colony

CLUMSINESS on one hand, unprecedented bullying on the other. That is the story of Russia's reaction to Estonia's decision to move a Soviet-era war memorial and 12 unmarked graves from a prominent position in the capital, Tallinn, to its international military cemetery.

Handled better, the move might have ruffled fewer feathers. But Estonia's prime minister, Andrus Ansip, first raised the issue for party advantage. He wanted his Reform party, founded by zealously free-market ex-communists, to pinch some patriotic votes from other centre-right parties in the March parliamentary elections. His country is now paying a colossal political, social and diplomatic price.

After the Estonian authorities sealed off the monument last weekend, hundreds of people, mostly from the 300,000-strong ethnic Russian population, rioted in Tallinn. They attacked the main theatre and the Academy of Arts, chanting “Fuck Estonia”, and “Russia, Russia”. Secondary-school pupils unfurled a banner outside parliament reading “USSR forever”. The supposed aim was to protect the war memorial—a bronze “liberator” that Estonians see as a symbol of their country's decades-long enslavement by the Soviet Union. But the main activity was looting. Dozens of shops were raided. The police, initially overwhelmed, made 1,000 arrests. One man was stabbed to death—in a row with another looter, Estonia says.

The rioting was not wholly spontaneous. Russian embassy officials had previously met leading protesters in curious places such as a botanical garden, according to pictures leaked by local spy-catchers. After the riot, another front opened: state websites were swamped by attacks from computers with Kremlin IP addresses.

That was swiftly followed by a blockade of Estonia's embassy in Moscow by protesters from Kremlin-run youth movements; they have attacked it with eggs, stones, paint and deafening music, ripped down the flag, and jostled the ambassador. They now threaten to demolish the embassy on May 9th, a public holiday that marks Soviet victory in Europe. Estonia has protested. So has NATO, mildly. Russia says it has stepped up security and blames Estonia for “stoking tensions”.

Then on May 1st Russian oil and coal exports to Estonia stopped, pending railway “repairs”. Freight transit through the country is lucrative for Russian business. But like other threatened boycotts, the move will not hurt Estonia much. Previous Russian sanctions have forced Estonian firms to trade chiefly with the West. Still, gas supplies are truly vulnerable, while the thriving tourism industry is nervously counting cancelled bookings.

Russia's rhetorical onslaught has been ferocious. Ignoring the looting, media there claim that “anti-fascist schoolchildren” trying to stop Estonians “demolishing” the memorial were “tortured” by the “inhuman” police. Russia's foreign minister said Estonia was behaving “disgustingly”. A delegation of Russian politicians, invited to see that the monument had been moved, not demolished, called for the government's resignation before setting off. On arrival, they repeatedly insulted their hosts, while demanding that “political prisoners” be freed.

This has scary echoes for Estonians. In 1940 a Soviet delegation issued similarly phrased demands. Weeks later, Estonia was wiped off the map. The protests also sit oddly with the ruthless way that entirely peaceful and purely political protests are squashed in Russia, as well as with the often casual treatment of war memorials there.

Estonian nerves are jangling. The riots punctured the illusion that local Russians were integrating smoothly. Meanwhile a country that was for long a European darling has been left pitifully exposed by its allies' muted and belated response.

"Leader" (editorial opinion) from this week's Economist

Estonia and Russia

The right to be wrong

May 3rd 2007
From The Economist print edition

Estonia was unwise to provoke Russia—but deserves more support from its friends

Reuters

FOR a small country living next to a bad-tempered big one, life is often difficult. So it is easy to sympathise with Estonia (population 1.3m), the closest that eastern Europe has to a real economic and political success story, in its spat with Russia (population 143m). The removal last weekend of a Soviet-era war memorial from the centre of the capital, Tallinn, to a military cemetery provoked rioting and looting by local Russians, and furious protests of “blasphemy” from Russia itself (see article). Dozens were hurt; one man died. Kremlin-sponsored heavies have blockaded Estonia's Moscow embassy and jostled the ambassador; oil exports have been cut.

Russia is grossly over-reacting. But Estonia's tactics were gravely mistaken. The country's prime minister, Andrus Ansip, made the future of the war memorial an issue in the run-up to the general election in March, hoping to gain votes from patriotic Estonians for his own Reform party. He won handsomely. But he was playing with fire. The monument offends many Estonians; some nickname the hulking bronze figure the “unknown rapist”. In 1944, a four-year Nazi occupation gave way to a more damaging, decades-long Soviet one. But for many ethnic Russians the bronze soldier symbolises wartime sacrifice and the defeat of fascism.

The damage done by Estonia's ill-explained move is out of all proportion to the gain. The government has now made the statue's removal a cause célèbre for every nutty Russian nationalist wanting to throw a punch. It has also undermined one of the great gains of the past 15 years: integrating many of the 300,000 Soviet-era (and often Soviet-minded) migrants and their descendants. Many have learned Estonian and acquired citizenship. They now feel their adopted country has betrayed them. The idea that Estonia's Russians might even set a good example for Russia itself has been derailed.

Worst of all, Russia may think Estonia is easily isolated. For days, a chilly silence prevailed in all big Western capitals, despite Russia's deplorable behaviour—first in whipping up sentiment in Estonia, and then in the grotesquely exaggerated responses orchestrated by the Kremlin. Relations with Russia are important, big countries mutter: why jeopardise them for a silly little country that has only itself to blame?

That risks making a bad situation still worse. Mr Ansip has blundered. But his country is nonetheless a commendably keen member of the European Union, and a loyal member of NATO too, contributing troops to the hairiest bit of Afghanistan. Estonia does useful work among other ex-communist countries, where it tries to promote reform, talk sense and calm rows. It deserves help, not to be left to twist in the cold wind from the east.

Russia should be told that its bullying is an intolerable echo of the past. Estonia's embassy in Moscow deserves proper police protection. Whatever their shortcomings, Estonia's politicians are not “fascists”. Contrary to the Russian media's allegations, the war graves around the monument have not been desecrated, but exhumed prior to proper reburial; the monument itself was not sawn up, but has already been re-erected nearby, in dignified surroundings.

The importance of this goes far beyond Estonia. If the Kremlin concludes that former Soviet satellites are not real members of Western clubs, but will be dumped by their allies once they blunder, the consequences for Europe's peace and stability will be lethal.

Europe.view

The black hole that ate Moldova

May 3rd 2007
From Economist.com

A glimpse inside Transdniestria

EMBARRASSINGLY sleazy, expensive and indefensible—but ours, and we are bloody well going to hang on to it. That was West Berlin during the cold war, seen through NATO eyes. And it may also explain why Russia has supported Transdniestria, a narrow strip of land on the eastern bank of the Dniestr river that has broken away from Moldova, the poorest and most demoralised country in Europe.

Just as Western soldiers propped up West Berlin, so Transdniestria has survived thanks to the presence of Russian military “peace-keepers”—really “piece-keepers”—maintaining their country's hold on territory that has been a bastion of Russian military strength for centuries. Western officials told the West Berlin government what to do; Russians occupy senior positions in Transdniestrian officialdom.

West Berlin was a thumb in the Soviet Union’s eye. A mixture of military conquest and ruthless power-politics had brought Soviet power to the heart of Europe, but West Berlin was a symbol of freedom. Here Soviet power had been checked.

Transdniestria is a thumb in the West’s eye. Brussels and Washington may have driven the Russians (for now) out of the Baltics, Central Europe and the Balkans. But at least in this corner of south-eastern Europe the influence of NATO and the European Union is checked.

West Berlin showed in concentrated form the weaknesses of its sponsors, including grotesque indulgence for both spies and businesses with good political connections.

Transdniestria, in turn, is a microcosm of Russia’s weaknesses. It is a legal and financial black hole in which politicians and officials turn lawlessness into lucrative business opportunity. Just like the motherland, it has fake pluralism, pseudo-democratic “youth movements” and an overmighty security service.

At the heart of power in Transdniestria is a grizzled veteran of the cold war, Vladimir Antufeyev. He left Latvia in a hurry after orchestrating a failed Soviet crackdown there in 1990. Now he is minister of state security in the Transndiestrian government. His office building has thick steel front doors; on the left is an anonymous interrogation room; up the stairs is his own office, insulated against listening devices and with quotes from Lenin’s secret police chief, Felix Dzerzhinsky, on the wall.

General Antufeyev’s steely manner would have fitted in well in cold-war Berlin; he could easily have been one of the Western or Soviet “advisers” who minded their docile, nominally independent authorities on either side of the Berlin Wall. He is charming, relentless, unflappable, with reasoning based on well-informed if flawed geopolitics: setbacks are inevitable; but there is no reason to worry; history is on our side.

The same resolute tune comes from his sidekick, Dmitri Soin, who runs the splendidly named Che Guevara School of Political Leadership—a youth movement that aims to funnel Transdniestria’s young people into constructive activities such as NATO-baiting. The pony-tailed, yoga-loving Mr Soin reminds one of senior officials in East Germany’s Communist youth movement, the FDJ: he is friendly, glib, slightly sinister.

Mr Soin and General Antufeyev don’t show it. But they are worried. The Kremlin now hopes to gain a bigger prize—pulling all Moldova into Russia’s sphere of security, economic and linguistic influence. That would mean a common Moldovan-Transdniestrian state, with some of the latter's pseudo-statehood shaved away. Moldova insists that any peace deal must include the departure of Mr Antufeyev and his colleagues. The Kremlin is certainly putting pressure on Transdniestria. Subsidies have dried up, debts are mounting, living standards are tumbling.

The EU will be tempted to nod through any settlement that gets Moldova off its conscience. A pity. Instead of rising to the level of Europe, Moldova risks being dragged down to the level of Transdniestria.

Estonia twists in the wind

Unlike the last piece, this may be freely quoted, reposted, or otherwise used.
Edward

I am not just worried. I am cross.

First I am cross that the Russians think they can blockade any country's embassy like this. I remember our vigil for Politkovskaya--it had to be across the street from the Russian embassy in London in order not to get on their nerves. Russia always insists on the most pedantic interpretation of the Vienna convention when its diplomats (and "embassy officials") get caught drunk driving, shoplifting etc. But when they want to throw their weight around--against a country that has already suffered so hugely at their hands in the past--then they ignore all the rules and just go ahead.

I am cross at the Estonian government too. I asked Ansip when he was in London--a couple of months ago--"Are you really sure you want to do this? You have no diplomatic support abroad; it is incredibly divisive at home." He blathered on about extremists, public order etc. I asked him "Can you name one politician in any other country who has come out in public support for moving the statue". He couldn't name one.

What makes me so angry is that these nitwits take Estonia's hardwon reputation for granted, rather like the decadent children of first-generation immigrants do with their parents' hard-earned fortunes. Do he and his colleagues have any idea how long it took to persuade people that Estonia was a proper country? That the language and citizenship laws were justified? That the economic boom was real (and not just "smuggling")? That NATO and EU membership was justified? And because of all that credibility in the bank, he feels he can go and squander it, just to get a few extra votes for his ex-komsomoltsy.

I am cross with parts of the Estonian media for their casual treatment of another asset built up so painfully over 15 years: harmony between people of different backgrounds. The "honest" coverage, implying that the "Russians" have shown themselves in their true colours, as habitual looters and hooligans, is outrageous.

I am cross with Savisaar for exploiting the riots in one way, and cross with his opponents for trying to make him the scapegoat for the whole thing. I can see a danger that Estonia becomes another Poland, leading with its chin in fights it can't win, alienating its friends and delighting Russia.

Should Ansip resign? Probably. I like the guy personally, but this is a disaster. What stays my hand is the feeling that if the bronze soldier hadn't been the provocation, the Russians would have found another one. The way things are now with the Kremlin, it was only a matter of time before the storm broke.

I am cross with the the looters, of course. The Estonians have treated the Soviet-era migrants with incredible generosity, restraint and patience. What an outrageous way to behave! I am cross with the local Russian-language press, which as far as I have seen has failed to publish pictures of the looting. I am cross with the Russian elite in Estonia which has not condemned the riots.

I am cross that when there is so much going on that is really important, both in the region and the world, everyone is wasting so much time about what is in the end just a rather bad statue.

I am really, really, cross with the feeble response from the EU and NATO. Why the **** can't the EU ambassadors come round to the Estonians and show some solidarity. I bet if you had 24 ambassadorial limos pushing their way through the crowd of Putin-jugend the police would take a bit more action. Why not call all 24 Russian ambassadors in the other EU capitals in to receive an identical protest? And do the same in the other G-7 countries. Talking of which, Russia's membership of the G8 and Council of Europe should surely be on the line now.

With the exception of Estonia's president, Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who has said and done all the right things, this is a story of grotesque self-indulgence, mixed with appalling moral cowardice.

Who will put Humpty-Dumpty together again?

Two pieces from this week's Economist, with similar thoughts in a more measured form, will follow later today.

Romania

Romanian politics

A captain faces the storm
Apr 26th 2007 | BUCHAREST
From The Economist print edition


Can an ex-communist country reform after joining the European Union?

AGAINST the darkening background of ex-communist politics, President Traian Basescu of Romania was something of a star. He identified bad government and corruption as the biggest obstacles to his country's accession to the European Union, and he forcefully—his foes say ruthlessly—pushed reforms of the justice system and the public services.

Foreigners liked the former sea captain's personal style: a mixture of mischievous humour and straight talk. Romanians liked him too, though his popularity rating has fallen to 41%, down from 49% in March and 57% last November. But most Romanian politicians detest Mr Basescu, finding him confrontational, devious and—perhaps most important—threatening. Last month the coalition that took the country into the EU on January 1st fell apart. Almost the first act of the incoming government was to push through a vote to suspend the president from office. Romanians will vote in a referendum on May 19th on whether to impeach him.

Romania's political theatre has turned positively operatic.



The electoral law is badly drafted. It says that a majority of the electorate must vote for impeachment for the poll to be valid. That is a high bar, so parliament has just changed the rules. Now it will decide what happens if the impeachment fails. Mr Basescu will be lucky to return to his hill-top palace soon.

Mr Basescu has played a strong hand badly. He has been too dependent on the country's powerful security and intelligence services. Too often he has chosen cronies and nonentities as advisers; they have tended to quit after a few months, exhausted and exasperated by his short attention span and frequent changes of mind. His colourful private life has created grist for Romania's active rumour mill.

He has also picked his fights poorly. He quarrelled at once with the new government, obstinately refusing to accept its nominee as foreign minister, Adrian Cioroianu. The parliamentary vote for his impeachment was a striking 322 to 108. Rather than seek compromise, Mr Basescu tends to take to the airwaves. “I will not negotiate,” he said before last week's vote. “I am not that interested in my political comfort. I will not stop talking either.”

Yet for all Mr Basescu's own shortcomings, his adversaries seem a lot worse. The acting president is the speaker of the Senate, Nicolae Vacaroiu. He led the authoritarian ex-communist government that ruled the country, badly, from 1992 to 1996. The new minority government of Liberals and ethnic Hungarians is stuffed with youthful party hacks. It also epitomises everything that has held Romania back. According to the Romanian Academic Society, the country's leading clean-government campaign, seven ministers breach the terms of the “Coalition for a Clean Parliament”, an anti-corruption pact agreed with all main Romanian parties in 2004. Some have dodgy ties to powerful businesses. Another received a colossal book advance from a mysterious source.

Outsiders are nervous about the second-biggest new EU member. The EU is pressing for a new ethics watchdog to be set up. The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, refused to meet Mr Cioroianu this week. A NATO summit planned next year has been shifted, probably to Portugal. Boosted by EU membership, Romania's economy is booming. But its political stock is falling fast.

europe.view column: how to fight back

Europe.view

Counter-attacking the Kremlin

Apr 26th 2007
From Economist.com

Support free media in Russia while you still can

THIS week’s Russian Economic Forum in London was a fiasco. The Kremlin signalled its current displeasure with the British government by making all the top Russian participants pull out at short notice.

That is a satisfying come-uppance for the morally myopic businessmen who shun any mention of Russia’s political problems. But it also highlights the Kremlin’s ominous use of commercial clout to influence decisions abroad.

Should Britain allow Boris Berezovsky to keep up his ill-phrased assault on Vladimir Putin’s regime from his Mayfair eyrie—or should he be encouraged to move abroad? Is it really in the public interest for Britain to issue arrest warrants for a couple of well-connected Russians who seem possible culprits in the radioactive poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko?

The British business view on these issues is a sorry mixture of pleading and panic: just give the Kremlin what it wants, so that we can get back on the gravy train. It’s the same story all over Europe. During the cold war the capitalists and the freedom fighters were on the same side. Now that alliance is broken, and the cause is muddier.

It is easy to conclude gloomily that the Kremlin has all the cards: oil, gas, money, decisiveness. The West is distracted, easily intimidated, and even more easily bought.

But counter-attack is possible.

Type rest of the post here

New Times is pretty much the only truly independent weekly left in Russia. Its editorial staff includes two of the remaining leading lights of serious Russian journalism: Yevgenia Albats, the country’s best investigative writer; and Raf Shakirov, fired from the editorship of Izvestia, once a top Russian daily, for his coverage of the botched anti-terrorism operation in Beslan. Its website carries footage of the Kremlin’s bully boys beating up opposition demonstrators—pictures that Russian television will scarcely touch.

The magazine is not perfect. Some may find it too wordy, or self-important, or shrill. But at least it is independent: it has no “sponsors”, no “roof”. The publisher, Irena Lesnevskaya, was told by a top Kremlin official that hiring Ms Albats was a “mistake”. Almost any other magazine in Russia would have hurried to correct the “mistake”. Ms Lesnevskaya politely refused.

Sympathetic outsiders who read Russian might consider subscribing. Every little helps. But what New Times really needs is advertisers. And in Russia now, nobody wants to risk incurring the Kremlin’s displeasure. Advertising in New Times would be commercial suicide, Russia’s top business people explain, while insisting that privately they are devoted to the cause of press freedom.

The only people who can help are those who have nothing to lose. It is time for Polish sausagemakers, Georgian wine producers, and Estonian sprat-canners to step forward for their unlikely moment of glory. They have suffered Russia’s spiteful boycotts and bans for months. Diplomacy has got them nowhere. They are mostly now thriving in other markets. So why not hit back, by taking out advertisements in New Times. “Dear Russian customers! We are sorry we can’t sell you our products right now—but please rest assured, we will return to you as soon as better times allow.”

The cost would be tiny relative to the psychological impact. Perhaps the tourist authorities could join in, underlining the welcome that awaits Russian visitors—sometimes to their surprise—in Warsaw, Tallinn and Tbilisi. Even Mr Putin’s Russia won’t touch the freedom to travel, leaving little scope for Kremlin revenge.

Outsiders can’t stop the Kremlin closing the New Times if it wishes. But they can at least help make it a commercial success while it lasts.

Daily Mail obit of Yeltsin

The drunk who rescued Russia

When Boris Yeltsin stood on a tank outside the Russian parliament in August 1991, he saved his country - and the world - from the last gasp of Soviet totalitarian rule.

For that, he deserves our undying gratitude.

It is easy to forget now how perilous was the moment. The chaotic regime of the dithering, waffling Mikhail Gorbachev had been toppled.

Tanks were on the streets of Moscow, backing a bunch of hard-line Communists who wanted to put the clock right back to the ice age, restoring the Soviet empire at home and abroad. Had they succeeded we would have faced a new Cold War - or possibly a very hot one.


Thanks to the bravery of Yeltsin - who died yesterday aged 76 after a history of heart trouble - in leading the resistance to their putsch, their plot failed.

And when Mr Gorbachev returned from his seaside holiday home, where the coup plotters had held him prisoner, he found Mr Yeltsin in charge.

The Soviet Union was to be wound up, he informed Mr Gorbachev brusquely. In its place would be 15 independent states - including the Russian Federation, until then a mere local government body of which Mr Yeltsin had been the president.

Mr Yeltsin moved into the Kremlin to rule over a ruined country. Communism was discredited, but the democrats had yet to gain any political authority.

Nothing worked. Even Western embassies were unable to get dollars from their bank accounts: every cent had been stolen or squandered. Public servants were unpaid.

The shops were empty. Inflation was raging. Savings had become meaningless numbers in a bank: useless amounts of a devalued currency.

Finland and other neighbouring countries were building refugee camps in case hunger drove millions of Russians to flee the country. Total disaster seemed only weeks away.

Against that background, Mr Yeltsin's achievements as the president of Russia are colossal. They dwarf his failures - terrible though they were.




In a few short weeks, his government of young reformers had laid the basis for Russia's economic survival. They freed prices from state control.

Literally the next day, goods started appearing - first in impromptu stalls on the pavements, then in makeshift kiosks, soon after that in shops.

The invisible hand of the market was able to do its work, for the first time since the Revolution. Many people were furious, claiming that the liberalised prices were extortionate.

Mr Yeltsin - no great economist - agreed, dismaying his government. But he did not order a return to Sovietstyle price control. Russian shoppers have never looked back.

The government privatised much of the Russian economy, too. It was hasty and messy.

A small number of ruthless men commandeered vast chunks of industry, ranging from useless factories that produced unsaleable junk to lucrative enterprises that produced vast mineral riches: oil, gas, gold and diamonds.

Some of these early capitalists disappeared without trace. Others became hugely wealthy, and soon turned their wealth into power. The West soon learned to call them the "oligarchs" - from the Greek word meaning "rule by a few".

Many Russians saw this as little more than looting. They were right to feel disgusted.

But Mr Yeltsin and his government knew that the vital task was to break the power of the "red barons" - the Communist factory directors who held huge amounts of both economic and political power.

Only when business was in private hands was there a chance that Russia's future would follow the laws of the market, rather than the political wishes of the old guard.

Now that Russia's economy is fuelled by high oil and gas prices, it is hard to remember how desperate the 1990s were.

Russia was dependent on bailout after bail-out from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the German and Japanese government, and other lenders. Much of it was stolen as soon as it arrived.

The country sank deep into debt, culminating in the default and devaluation of August 1998 - the most critical moment in Russia's post-Communist history, when ordinary Russians found that their savings were wiped out as the rouble plunged in value and the whole banking system teetered on the point of collapse.

"Everything they told us in the Soviet era about Communism was false. But everything they told us about capitalism was true," Russians commented in disgust.

Mr Yeltsin had already given his people plenty of other cause for disgust. He had introduced the virus of vote-rigging into Russia's infant democracy.

A referendum on a new constitution in 1993 was grotesquely flawed. So was his own presidential reelection campaign in 1996, where he trounced the Communist challenger.

Worse, Yeltsin allowed violence to become a political currency. He ordered the army to shell the Russian parliament in 1993, to defeat a bunch of hardline Communist and nationalist deputies who had holed up there.

He unleashed the might of the Russian military on the small breakaway republic of Chechnya, fighting a gruesomely destructive two-year war that ended in a humiliating truce for Russia.

These mistakes were partly the product of bad advice, mainly stemming from his daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, and her array of cronies. These included manipulative, over-mighty tycoons.

Ordinary Russians were rightly disgusted to see their country run by the president's daughter and her dodgy friends. Mr Yeltsin's own choice of companions was little better: his thuggish bodyguard chief ran a private commercial empire.

Russians were disgusted, too, by their president's shambolic public appearances. During a state visit to Germany, he drunkenly seized the baton from the bemused conductor of a military band and tried to conduct the music himself.

Watching the television reports that mercilessly showed not just that, but also the embarrassed smiles of his German hosts, worsened Russians' fragile self-esteem.

During a stopover in Ireland, en route to America, he was so drunk that his aides were unable to rouse him to meet the Irish dignitaries waiting for him.

That showed a streak of irresponsibility all too characteristic of the Russian approach to life.

Mr Yeltsin was an alcoholic and this led to his quintuple bypass operation in late 1996. Those who knew him well said that he never fully recovered from that.

Mr Yeltsin's gravest mistake, though, was not his tolerance of crooks, but of spooks.

He allowed the KGB to metamorphose into Russia's new security agencies - tantamount to allowing the Gestapo and SS a role in postwar West Germany.

Since that failure to uproot the murderous structures of the past, the agencies of murder, torture and blackmail have entrenched themselves in the heart of the new Russia.

They even managed to get one of their number - Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin - into Mr Yeltsin's own job.

The deal around Mr Putin's rise to power in 1999 marked the nadir of Mr Yeltsin's presidency. He was fearful of impeachment. His inner circle feared for their new private wealth - and their freedom.

They knew that outsiders would subject their business deals and swiftly-obtained riches to the harshest scrutiny.

So the crooks and spooks cooked up a deal. In return for the quiet, unthreatening Mr Putin being made prime minister, and then president, Mr Yeltsin and his family would gain life-long immunity from prosecution.

In retrospect, that seems an appalling mistake. For all his faults, Mr Yeltsin was, at heart, a democrat. He believed passionately in freedom, particularly freedom of the Press, which flowered under his rule as never before or since in Russia.

The sharpest criticism and the most devastating satire could be broadcast - and roused not a squeak of protest from the president.

Even at his weakest and most drunken he would firmly remind his aides that freedom for the media was untouchable. Contrast that to

the recent edict from President Putin that the Russian media was to give at least half of their stories a "positive spin".

Mr Yeltsin's mistakes, and they were many, were ruthlessly attacked by the most powerful media in the land. Mr Putin's mistakes - far more grievous - go all but unmentioned. That, in a nutshell, is the huge and dismal shift between then and now.

Mr Yeltsin's weaknesses and failings are all the more excusable when you consider his background. Given his career in the Communist Party, it is surprising that he understood so much about the workings of a true democracy.

Unlike Mr Putin, a career spy in Russia's foreign intelligence service, Mr Yeltsin had scarcely travelled abroad before taking high office.

Born into a peasant family from the Urals in 1931, Yeltsin's family lived in a one-room wooden hut - his father once spent three years in dictator Stalin's gulag for grumbling at work - and Boris's childhood was blighted when he blew off two fingers on one hand while playing with a live hand grenade.

Despite such setbacks, he went on to graduate as a civil engineer, rising to become a construction manager and joining the Communist Party.

By 1976 he was a local party boss and nine years later, Mikhail Gorbachev, the new Soviet leader, summoned him to Moscow with a mandate to reform the corrupt party system.

But his reputation as a maverick and his growing disenchantment with the old ways led to a swift and final break with the Communist Party when he was sacked from the Central Committee in 1987.

Two years in the political wilderness followed, during which he came to his most fundamental political conclusions.

For Yeltsin did not just believe in free media, he believed in free people. He was convinced that Russians could be democrats just like anyone else.

He wanted them to enjoy the fruits of democracy as far and as fast as possible. And he wanted Russia to be a respected and admired member of the family of free nations, breaking with the Soviet past.

Contrast that with Mr Putin, a man drenched in Soviet-style contempt for the people, and convinced of his own right to manipulate and mislead them. Where Yeltsin sought friends, Putin seeks to instil fear.

Yeltsin denounced the crimes of Stalin; Putin raised a glass to his memory at a public banquet.

Russia-watchers are now waiting in fascination to see how the controlfreaks in the Kremlin will deal with Yeltsin's death. Putin's line is that most of Russia's ills stem from the "chaos" of the 1990s.

Yet as the vice tightens on the remains of Russian democracy, with riot police brutally dispersing opposition demonstrations, and every independent organisation fearing the attention of the secret police, many may miss the anarchic, rough-andready freedoms of the Yeltsin era.

The official line at his funeral will be to highlight Russia's newly acquired financial strength and political stability.

But there is another story to tell too: of Russia's great democratic dreams brought low by the unsuspected weakness of the good, and the unsuspected strength of the bad.

Yeltsin obit from Economist website

The life of Yeltsin



Bye-bye Boris

Apr 23rd 2007
From Economist.com

Boris Yeltsin has died. He symbolised post-communist Russia’s greatest strengths—and its weaknesses

AFP

Get article background

BORIS NIKOLAYEVICH YELTSIN helped to destroy the Soviet Union and did much to bring Russia’s democracy into existence. The former construction engineer was not a great builder of institutions; the democracy was flawed. But he had the right instincts. For liberating Russians from the yoke of the one-party state and the planned economy, he deserves immense gratitude. Yet his nepotistic and capricious rule spawned colossal lawlessness and corruption, paving the way for his authoritarian successor, Vladimir Putin.

Born in 1931, Mr Yeltsin was a loyal provincial Communist, bulldozing the Ipatiev house in Sverdlovsk (now, again, Yekaterinburg) where the last tsar’s family was murdered. Promoted to Moscow party chief under Mikhail Gorbachev, he showed a revolutionary popular touch. Communist chieftains shunned the people. Mr Yeltsin mixed with them, sharing their fury about the shortages and indignities of daily life.

In 1987 Mr Gorbachev fired him, after an outburst that included direct criticism of the Soviet leader’s wife, Raisa: even in the burgeoning atmosphere of glasnost [openness], that was still taboo. Mr Yeltsin retreated to the shadows, only to return in 1990 as president of the Russian Federation. Russia’s statehood had been as nominal as those of other Soviet Socialist Republics such as Ukraine or Kazakhstan. But as the Baltic republics started galloping towards freedom, with Mr Yeltsin’s enthusiastic support, that changed. Could the Russian Federation too one day become a proper country?

It soon did. When bumbling Communist party hardliners mounted a coup against the Soviet leadership in 1991, it was Mr Yeltsin, denouncing the putschists while perched on a tank, who symbolised the successful democratic resistance. When Mr Gorbachev returned to Moscow from his seaside captivity, he found Mr Yeltsin in charge. The Russian leader humiliatingly gave his former boss a decree to read out acknowledging the new order.

As the other 14 Soviet republics digested their independence, Mr Yeltsin appointed a short-lived government of young reformers, led by Yegor Gaidar, who unleashed breakneck economic reform on the ruined country. It was deeply unpopular: price liberalisation made evident the destruction of savings under Soviet inflation. Privatisation meant a field day for robber barons. The institutions needed for a properly functioning market economy were pitifully lacking. It was in the Yeltsin era that the world learnt the term “oligarch”, to describe the overmighty tycoons who fused political and economic power.

Yet those reforms worked. Russia has a booming consumer-goods market. The robber barons were a lot better than the “red directors” they replaced, whose thinking and loyalties were still rooted in the Communist-run planned economy.

If the economic reforms now look better than they seemed at the time, his political failures look worse. Shelling Russia’s parliament in 1993, supposedly to dislodge Communist and other hardline deputies who had seized control there, reintroduced the virus of violence into Russian political life. So did the shameful Chechen war of 1994-96, which unleashed the might of the Russian war machine on the small breakaway republic. His rigged victory over the Communist Gennady Zyuganov in the 1996 presidential election spawned a habit of official vote-rigging that has largely destroyed the credibility of Russian elections.

His mistakes were greatest when prompted by his family and their cronies. While keeping the old man topped up with vodka, they hijacked Russia’s political and economic destiny, enriching themselves and discrediting both democracy and capitalism in the eyes of millions of outraged and contemptuous citizens.

All the same, Mr Yeltsin stood for three fundamental principles. He believed in freedom of speech, including freedom of the press, no matter what. He wanted Russia to be friends with the west. And he despised the Communist party and everything it stood for—particularly the KGB. It was a tragedy that he did not dissolve it fully in 1991, when he had the chance. It was an irony that the candidate his family chose as a safe successor, the cautious, little-known ex-KGB man, Mr Putin, should have done so much to reverse his legacy, blaming so many of Russia’s ills on what he calls the “chaos” of the 1990s.

Moldova/Russia latest

Moldova and Russia

A thaw in the river

Apr 19th 2007 | CHISINAU AND TIRASPOL
From The Economist print edition

A settlement in Transdniestria is bad news for Moldova—and the West

ITS consequences may be disastrous, but a deal on the worst territorial dispute in Europe's poorest country was still too tempting. Moldova, sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania, has been split ever since a brief civil war in 1992. Its industrialised part—a strip of land to the east of the Dniester river—maintains an unrecognised independence, propped up by Russia's cheap gas and its contingent of “peacekeepers”.

Transdniestria, as it is called, is a black hole. It makes weapons, ranging from cheap submachineguns to high-tech missile parts. The customers are unknown. It also has lucratively porous borders: one common scam is to smuggle American chicken-meat in and out of Ukraine's protected home market, at a profit of some €700 ($950) per tonne.

Previous attempts to broker a peace deal have got nowhere. Transdniestria's rulers have close ties with business-minded counterparts in Ukraine, Russia and even in Moldova proper. And Russia is unwilling to give up a sliver of its former empire. Last year it imposed a punishing embargo on Moldovan wine. But now Moldova is shifting its position. Last week President Vladimir Voronin set out a new approach that suits the Kremlin—but will dismay Moldova's friends in the West.

In a declaration to be signed jointly with the Transdniestrian leader, Igor Smirnov, Moldova will for the first time recognise Transdniestria's government and leadership as legitimate entities. Voters on both sides will elect a new Moldovan parliament. Transdniestria will keep its Supreme Soviet and have top deputy ministers in the national government. By 2009 Russia's troops will be replaced by unarmed international monitors.

American and European Union diplomats found out about all this only when Vladimir Socor, a Munich-based analyst, published a leaked version last week. Now officials in Washington, DC, and Brussels are urgently seeking clarification. They hope it is an idea, not a real plan, but they fear the worst. Even unencumbered by Transdniestria, Moldova's economy has been lacklustre. Of its 4.4m people, at least 400,000 have emigrated; the country survives on their remittances. A dose of Transdniestrian politics is likely only to strengthen all the darkest forces in Moldovan public life.

And what guarantee is there that the deal will stick? “Russia tends to take agreements as the basis not for implementation, but for further negotiation,” says one cross official. The Kremlin has twice ignored previous deadlines for withdrawing troops. Suppose that, in a year's time, it finds pressing reasons for staying on?

A third question concerns the Transdniestrian KGB. Closely linked to Moscow, it is run by Vladimir Antufeyev, who was involved in a failed Soviet crackdown in the Baltic states in 1990. Many think it is he, not Mr Smirnov, who runs the show. The Moldovan minister for Transdniestria, Vasile Sova, insists Mr Antufeyev and his pals must leave. Will they?

But the biggest puzzle is the timing. Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, may have convinced Mr Voronin, a naïve ex-baker, that the moment was ripe for a deal. Russia may have wanted a quick fix to contrast with the wrangles at the United Nations over the future of Kosovo, Serbia's breakaway province. Yet if the Kremlin was in such a rush, why was it Moldova that had to make concessions?

Crony capitalism could be triumphing over other differences. A top Moldovan politician's scrap-metal business sells mainly to a steel mill in Transdniestria. The son of another has a chain of fast-food restaurants that operates in the separatists' capital, Tiraspol. In theory, cash from the West should counteract any pull from the east: foreign donors have pledged more than $1.2 billion to Moldova in the next three years. But much of this depends on reforms that the country's lethargic and corrupt administration is loth to embrace.

It will be hard for outsiders to block the deal; they may not even bother to try. If they did, they might be called wreckers, given that both sides want it. Yet Mr Voronin's plan means that Russia has, for once, trumped the West. Who might be next?

Europe.view

The autocrat at the table

Apr 19th 2007
From Economist.com

Heads of state: a user's guide

A SOCIAL engagement with an east European head of state is not something to engage in lightly. In some countries, you may find the top man willing to meet over a meal or a drink. But others are so hedged around with protocol that only long-standing and intimate friends can hope to get through the surrounding fortifications of aides, flaks, bodyguards and cronies.

And in some cases there may be little point in trying to do so. Sparkling conversation and stimulating views are not what leaps to mind when Hungary’s president, László Sólyom, is mentioned.

Visiting Lech Kaczynski of Poland is great fun if you have a good knowledge of Gdansk opposition politics in the early 1970s; conversation on other topics is more limited, and can be alarming. Slovakia’s president, Ivan Gasparovic, has interesting contrarian views on Serbia, but not much else.

Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine finds it hard to get up in the morning, so avoid any suggestion of a power breakfast, and notoriously wayward when it comes to timekeeping (your columnist once waited 11 hours). So accept lunch, but plan for dinner.

Vaira Vike-Freiberga of Latvia is punctual, but has a queenly manner that many might find insufferable in a country ten (or one hundred) times bigger. With a bit of luck, you may get a few glimpses of the charming and brainy Canadian professor who lives under the carapace of protocol.

Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic, by contrast, is exactly the same whether you have known him for ten minutes or 20 years: abrasive, forceful, well-informed and magnificently dismissive of views other than his own. If you have a Nobel prize for economics, he may give your views a marginally more polite hearing. Otherwise, thicken your skin.

Janez Drnovsek of Slovenia, by contrast, is a dreamy, mystical fellow; he would seem more at home running an alternative bookshop, perhaps with a sideline in healing crystals and aromatic oils. A cup of herb tea and a light lentil salad will accompany your discussion of world peace and the healing properties of mountains.

At his dacha outside Moscow, Vladimir Putin of Russia hosts regular meetings for a charmed circle of well-disposed and well-connected outsiders. They are not exactly informal, but they do display his formidable self-confidence in dealing with any question you like to throw at him over a period of many hours; many western politicians would lack the stamina to do that. Even the most hardheaded visitors have been known to succumb to his highly professional persuasive talents.

EPA

Stop me if you've heard this one before

Transdniestria’s president, Igor Smirnov, should be described as “head of statelet”, not head of state: his breakaway region is not recognised by the outside world. But despite a peppery manner, and behind a cloud of smoke from his beloved Balkan Sobranie cigarettes, he has a surprisingly sharp sense of fun. Just try to stay off politics.

The ideal evening would probably start with President Traian Basescu of Romania (pictured, left) and a beer in one of the Bucharest bars that he likes to frequent. The former sea-captain’s salty humour is hard to resist: he must have run a happy ship. His views—mostly—are sensible: anti-corruption, pro-American. Next would come dinner with Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia. His public face is now, wisely, bland, but in private his views are as incisive and entertaining as ever. Then time for one of the late-night pow-wows for which Toomas Hendrik Ilves is famous. Estonia’s bow-tie clad head of state will still be in full flow as you stagger off for a few hours sleep, wishing you hadn't arranged a breakfast meeting for later that morning.

Poland and Auschwitz

Poland and the second world war

Black mischief

Apr 12th 2007 | WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

Whose version of history should prevail at Auschwitz?

COMPARED with the other horrors of Auschwitz, questions of nationality might seem secondary. But they rankle. Russia wants to describe as “Soviet citizens” the hundreds of thousands of people killed there who came from such places as eastern Poland and Lithuania. During the camp's existence, these were part of the Soviet Union. Poles find the wording infuriating: the Hitler-Stalin carve-up of eastern Europe was a crime, not a mere historical backdrop.

Russia closed its exhibition at Auschwitz in 2003, to update it. But the Polish authorities will not let it reopen unless it changes its terminology. Russia is furious. A Russian politician, Konstantin Kosachev, accused Poland of wanting to “rewrite history”. A Russian Jewish leader called the move “blasphemous”. Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Auschwitz inmate who was also twice Poland's foreign minister, and who chairs the museum's international council, accuses Russia of “sheer arrogance”.

Attempts to exploit Auschwitz are hardly new. Under communism, the museum there oozed Soviet propaganda, obscuring the fact that most of the million-plus murdered in the camp were Jews. Poles are twitchy when outsiders call it a “Polish death camp” and neglect to mention that it was built and run by the country's Nazi occupiers.

A somewhat similar row is brewing in Estonia, where the government wants to move a Soviet-era war memorial from the centre of Tallinn to a war cemetery. The figure of a bronze soldier is seen as a heroic liberator by many locals with Russian ancestry. But to many Estonians the “unknown rapist” symbolises only the switch between a Nazi occupation and an even more brutal Soviet one.

Russia's relations with its former satellites are not uniformly bad: it has just signed a border treaty with Latvia and its ties with Hungary are positively chummy. But relations with Poland are icy. Last year the Poles vetoed the start of talks on a new EU-Russian co-operation agreement, because of a year-long Russian embargo on Polish meat exports, imposed seemingly out of spite. That issue is now sure to overshadow next month's EU-Russia summit.

Yet squabbles about sausages may be patched up more easily than rows about the past. Under Vladimir Putin, the Soviet version of history has become part of Russia's own story. The idea that anyone might not have wished to be a “Soviet citizen” seems baffling and rather ungrateful. The Poles find Russian nostalgia for the Soviet empire not just baffling, but worrying.

Europe View column: Kodori gorge

Europe.view

Georgia gets a rocket

Apr 12th 2007
From Economist.com

Beware Russian gunships that pass in the night

WAS it a stunt, a signal or a test? A month after helicopters launched a night-time rocket attack on government buildings in Georgia’s Kodori gorge, nobody knows. As so often in post-Soviet imperial politics, the big picture is clear, but the details are mysterious.

The big picture is that Georgia is trying to re-establish control over two breakaway regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which have claimed independence with Russian backing.

In Abkhazia, Georgia has replaced the bandits who were running the Kodori gorge, a remote upland district, with a normal (by Georgian standards) civilian administration.

In South Ossetia, the Georgian authorities have set up a local government in a village that has always been under Georgian control. This new outfit is run by prominent South Ossetian political figures who have fallen out with the imported Kremlin stooges in charge of the separatist administration.

The aim is to make Georgia a magnet, attracting back minorities repelled by the swaggering ethno-nationalism of the early 1990s. Fast growth and some institutional reform already make Georgia look pretty good, if no showcase, when measured against Russia’s troubled periphery across the Caucasus mountains. Russia's attempts at sanctions and harassment have not brought Georgia to its knees; rather, they have strengthened its self-confidence and encouraged its integration with the West.

An ambitious Abkhaz or Ossetian thus faces an interesting choice: Russia’s gas-fired crony capitalism, with all the problems of the north Caucasus neighbourhood thrown in; or Georgia, and its path of European and Atlantic integration. Neither is hugely attractive right now, but it is hard to see the Russian option getting more compelling, whereas Georgia’s future is looking increasingly bright.

So much for the big picture. Russia is losing out, with a bad grace, to an upstart former satellite. But what about the helicopters? Predictably, the Kremlin line is that Georgia attacked itself to gain sympathy. But in truth the culprits can only have been Russian. Who else in the region has the military capability to launch precision airstrikes at night?

The raid might have been a prelude to an attack aimed at regaining control over the Kodori gorge. But no ground troops followed it up. Most likely it was an attempt to provoke Mikheil Saakashvili, the volatile Georgian president, into an ill-judged retaliation. If so, it failed. Since some American-inspired arm-twisting last year, Mr Saaskashvili’s public utterances have been exemplary.

Just possibly, the attack was nothing to do with local politics, but one Kremlin faction signalling to another that it has the capability to start a war if thwarted. If so, that’s bad news for Russia’s neighbours, who have long feared such stunts in the run-up to Russia's presidential election next year. Maybe the attackers expected more impact: it was pure chance that all the buildings were unoccupied. Nobody was killed, or even hurt. Perhaps they will be, next time.

In theory, the attack should be investigated by the United Nations Observer Misson in Georgia, which tries to keep an eye on what Russia calls its “peace-keeping” force in Abkhazia (given its bias, others call it piece-keeping). The UN mission’s quadripartite fact-finding group—of Georgians, Russians and Abkhaz, under a UN chairman—has convened, but produced only a vague press release.

This week talks started in New York on the extension of the mission’s mandate. Nobody is expecting Russia to be called harshly to account. The mission will stay supine and useless, as its response to the Kodori raid shows. A Kremlin victory, then, in one sense. But the upshot is that Georgian diplomats have never had such a sympathetic hearing, nor Russia a more sceptical one.

book review: Anna Politkovskaya's diaries

Anna Politkovskaya review


Russia

A slice of death
Apr 4th 2007
From The Economist print edition



A Russian Diary
By Anna Politkovskaya

BEFORE she was murdered, Anna Politkovskaya was one of President Vladimir Putin's most outspoken critics. On October 7th 2006, when she was shot by a contract killer in the stairwell of her home, she became the best-known victim of the Russia he has created.

Not that there is any proof that the Russian authorities ordered her shooting: indeed the Kremlin line is that it was a cynical move by Mr Putin's enemies abroad. Others believe that the murder was ordered by one of the factions in Chechnya, whose brutality and larceny she passionately chronicled.

Ms Politkovskaya's diaries are both gripping and flawed. Her great gift is for telling with unsentimental sympathy the stories of people caught up in the Russian state's mincing machines: the relatives of those who disappear to torture and death in Chechnya; the Russian veterans of the conflict, neglected and unemployably traumatised; the drunken, decaying squalor of life in the Russian boondocks.

She also captures the political atmosphere of modern Russia, including the obfuscation and pomposity, the shameless mendacity, the hopeless squabbles and wishful thinking of the opposition. Her two central characters are Mr Putin himself, whose cloyingly insincere public utterances and occasional mistakes she describes with savage glee; and Ramzan Kadyrov, a thuggish and volatile pro-Kremlin Chechen warlord (now the republic's president), whom she describes repeatedly—and bravely—as a “lunatic”.

But her judgments are so sweeping and harsh that the fair-minded reader may flinch a bit. Is it really fair to compare Mr Putin with Stalin? The war in Chechnya does have awful similarities to Stalin's campaigns against Baltic and Ukrainian partisans after 1945, but has not so far been accompanied by wholesale deportations to Siberia. Ms Politkovskaya's biggest struggle was with indifference, not censorship. She was kept off the air, her articles published in a small-circulation weekly. But in the truly totalitarian state in which she grew up, such articles would not have appeared at all, and circulating even blurred carbon copies would have risked the gulag.

Yet overstatement, like inconsistency, is a diarist's privilege. Read with the volume turned down a notch, the book is a valuable, if unhappy, account of the last years of her life. It is worth reading just for her report on the terrorist seizure of a school in Beslan, the extraordinarily bungled and bloody military operation that ended it and the cynical official cover-up that continues to this day.

Anyone hoping to learn about Ms Politkovskaya as a person, though, will be disappointed. Her life outside journalism and politics does not feature, even as a backdrop. That is a welcome contrast to the self-important style of many lesser journalists' books about great events. If Ms Politkovskaya experienced discomfort, amusement or boredom, she did not bother to write it down: it was her subjects' story that mattered, not hers.

A good biographer may one day plug that gap. But nothing will fill the void left by her murder.


A Russian Diary
By Anna Politkovskaya



Harvill Secker; 272 pages; £17.99. To be published in America by Random House next month

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