another europe.view column

EUROPE

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Small news, big stories

Aug 16th 2007
From Economist.com

Nothing ever happens in August, right?

AUGUST in western Europe is quiet almost by official decree. In the eastern part of the continent people still work a bit harder, but the drip of drivel from second-rate politicians who should be off at the beach means that summer can feel stupefying. It is time to drink kvass (fermented breadcrumbs), to eat chilled cherry soup or iced yoghurt, to swim in lakes and forget about politics.

But the summer is also a time when interesting news items pop up that are pointers to bigger stories around the corner. Here are three.

A Ukrainian TV channel reports that 50,000 people in the western region of Chernovtsy now hold Romanian passports. Northern Bukovina, as it used to be known, was part of Romania before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 (another bit of August news that proved more important than it seemed at the time). This added a slice of Romanian territory to the Soviet Union. Most is the area now called Moldova. But fragments to the north and south went to Soviet Ukraine.

Moldovans are entitled to Romanian passports if they can prove a family connection to pre-war Romania. Since Romania joined the EU, many have applied. That delights Romanian nationalists, and infuriates most Moldovan politicians who think that their bigger neighbour wants to swallow them up.

But this is the first sign that the same process is happening in the bit of Romanian territory now in Ukraine—a region that Soviet repressions seemed to have scrubbed bare of any trace of Romanian national feeling. A century ago, Czernowitz, as it used to be known, was a stellar example of Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnicity. Those traditions are hard to kill. Ukrainian politicians may fret about their people holding second passports illegally, but they should bear in mind that the longer their country’s political paralysis continues, the more its artificial Soviet-era borders may come under scrutiny.

Russia’s ability to shoot itself in the foot remains both spectacular and entertaining

The second item is about GUAM, an American-backed talking shop that links Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova. Supposedly a rival to the clutch of Kremlin-led organisations in the former Soviet Union, and also a waiting room for NATO, GUAM is almost moribund. Although Georgia is a gung-ho backer, other members are lukewarm or even chilly. Grand plans to include Romania and the Baltic states have stalled.

This week pro-Kremlin opposition parties in all four member states said they were stepping up their campaign against the organisation’s vestigial security role—chiefly its tentative proposal to establish a joint peacekeeping force. GUAM should regard that as rather flattering: it may be that their ramshackle organisation now attracts more interest from its bashers in Moscow than from its backers in Washington, DC.

That is an impressive sign of the Kremlin’s attention to detail in its own backyard. But as the third news item illustrates, Russia’s ability to shoot itself in the foot remains both spectacular and entertaining. To illustrate the daring descent to the Arctic seabed last week, Rossiya TV, one of the many docile pro-Kremlin channels, carried what seemed to be authentic footage of miniature submarines in the sea depths. But a 13-year-old boy in Finland noticed an uncanny resemblance between stills of the footage reprinted in a newspaper and scenes from a DVD in his collection: “Titanic”. Only days earlier, another Russian TV news programme had faked a picture of the London Times, making out that a rare pro-Russian comment piece was not buried inside the paper, but splashed on the front. Ascribing demonic genius to the Kremlin’s spin doctors and geopoliticians is tempting. But only when they deal with their own side’s incompetence will they be really scary.

eSStonia

EUROPE

Europe.view

The truth about eSStonia

Aug 16th 2007
From Economist.com

Its citizenship policy has been a success

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READ the Russian-language internet, and you will find Estonia portrayed as a hell-hole ruled by Nazi sympathisers who organise a grotesque form of apartheid hypocritically endorsed by the European Union.

“Nazi” and “apartheid” are strong words that should be used sparingly and precisely out of their original context—and probably not at all. (A good rule in most discussions is that the first person to call the other a Nazi automatically loses the argument.)

So it may be worth listing a few of the more grotesque unfairnesses and inaccuracies of the charge. Apartheid was the legally enforced separation of the peoples of South Africa, based on race (or more accurately, skin colour). Mingling of the races, from intermarriage to mixed swimming, was forbidden. Pass laws meant that blacks could not live in white areas. Apartheid was backed up by a ruthless secret police that on occasion murdered people, and had no hesitation in enforcing house arrest and exile.

Nazi sympathisers idolise Hitler, think that Jews invented the Holocaust (or, sometimes, that they deserved what they got), and believe that National Socialism was a glorious ideology destroyed by Judaeo-Bolshevism.

Absolutely none of that applies to Estonia. Not only do the authorities not prohibit contact between Estonians and Russians, they encourage it. Russians and Estonians mix freely everywhere. Some of Estonia’s top politicians, including the president and the leader of one of the main political parties have Russian family ties.

Estonians look back on the Nazi occupation with loathing. Their country was caught between the hammer and the anvil in 1939, and whatever they did, only suffering and destruction awaited them.

What really annoys the Kremlin crowd is that Estonians (like many others in eastern Europe) regarded the arrival of the Red Army in 1944-45 not as a liberation, but as the exchange of one ghastly occupation for another. That flatly contradicts the Kremlin’s revived Stalinist version of history, which puts Soviet wartime heroism and sacrifice at centre-stage, while assiduously obscuring all the historical context. Given how the Soviet Union treated Estonia in 1939-41, it is hardly surprising that those who fought the occupiers when they returned are regarded as heroes. But they were not Nazis, nor are those who admire them now.

Given how Soviet Union treated Estonia in 1939-41, it is hardly surprising that those who fought the occupiers when they returned are regarded as heroes

Secondly, Estonians (like Latvians and Lithuanians) do not accept that their pre-war statehood was ever extinguished. Russia may like to think that the Soviet Union magnanimously granted independence to the three “Soviet Baltic Republics” in 1991. But the Balts see it differently: they regained their independence. In that view they are confirmed, more or less enthusiastically, by most western countries, which never recognised the Soviet annexation of 1940, and in some cases continued to accredit Baltic diplomats in dusty and deserted embassies.

On that basis, the hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens who moved to the Baltic from the 1950s onwards were migrants settling illegally in occupied territories. Post-Soviet Lithuania granted them citizenship automatically. But Estonia and Latvia, where the demographic position was more precarious, insisted that they apply for citizenship if they wanted it, and pass a simple test in language and history.

This was not about ethnicity: Russians who lived in Estonia before the occupation (then around 10% of the population) and their descendants regained citizenship automatically. And it has worked rather well. Nearly 150,000 people have gained Estonian citizenship; only 8.5% remain stateless.

Fifteen years on, Estonia's policy may be too tough, or just right, or even too lax. Compared to most European countries’ citizenship laws, it is quite generous. In any event, calling it “apartheid” is not only nonsensical, but stupidly insulting, to a country that has responded with intelligence and restraint to a devastating historical injury.

Communism and Nazism/ Gellately book review

Compare and contrast
Aug 9th 2007
From The Economist print edition



Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
By Robert Gellately



Knopf; 720 pages; $35. To be published in Britain by Jonathan Cape in September.

IN THEIR different ways they were as bad as each other, the three monsters of 20th-century Europe. That is an oddly controversial statement. Hitler is almost universally vilified; Lenin remains entombed on Red Square as Russia's most distinguished corpse; and modern Russia is looking more kindly on Stalin's memory.

Robert Gellately elegantly scrutinises their differences and highlights their similarities. He places all three men in the context of a Europe shattered by the first world war. “Before 1914 they were marginal figures,” he writes, without “the slightest hope of entering political life.” The whirlwind of destruction that started in 1914 turned their fantasies of racial purity and class dictatorship into reality, killing people on a scale unknown in human history.

Anyone who still believes in the myth—assiduously propagated by the Soviet Union and its admirers—of the “good Lenin” will find the book uncomfortable reading. The author outlines with exemplary clarity Lenin's cruelty, his illegal and brutal seizure of power, his glee in ordering executions, the institution of mass terror as a means of political control and the construction of the first camps in what later became the gulag. “Far from perverting or undermining Lenin's legacy, as is sometimes assumed, Stalin was Lenin's logical heir,” he writes icily.



Mr Gellately busts another myth too: that Hitler seized power by fear and force. The combination of anti-Jewish and anti-Bolshevik rhetoric played well with the German public. People felt humiliated by defeat and impoverished by recession, and Hitler blamed “the Jews” for both.

Hitler looked on Soviet methods with contempt. His model was what Mr Gellately calls “consensus dictatorship”: cautious, sounding out public opinion and changing course when necessary. Unlike Stalin, Hitler did not make a habit of murdering his closest allies. The Nazi party never experienced the ritual purges that were a habitual feature of Soviet Communist Party life under Stalin. Hitler's adversaries were so demoralised by the seeming success of his regime that few offered systematic resistance. It was only as defeat loomed in the last months of the war that ordinary Germans had a taste of the official paranoia that had been their Soviet counterparts' daily fare for 25 years.

Lucid prose and vivid examples make the book admirably accessible to non-specialists. But it also engages expertly in one of the most closely fought historiographical battles of past decades, the Historikerstreit (to give it its German name). Was the bacillus of totalitarianism that infected Germany first bred in Russia? Some German historians, notably Ernst Nolte, have argued that Hitler's crimes were both a distorted copy of atrocities already committed under communism and to some extent a defensive reaction to them. To caricature the argument: Germany declared war on Jews because Jews (at least communist ones) had declared war on Germany.

Mr Gellately has no time for Mr Nolte, who he says is guilty of an “astonishing and reprehensible replication of Nazi rhetoric”. Just because many communists were Jews does not mean that there was anything remotely rational in Hitler's constant conflation of “Jewish-Bolshevism”. Nazi anti-Semitism, he insists, was “rooted in German nationalism.”

The argument about the origins of Nazism will run and run. But there is little danger of Germany rehabilitating Hitler, even in the driest and most academic corners of historical theory. In Russia, by contrast, Stalin's memory is being burnished. A new guide for history teachers describes Stalin as the Soviet Union's “most successful leader”; it admits that “political repression” took place, but says it “was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite.” President Vladimir Putin, welcoming this guide, compared Stalin's Great Terror of 1937 with the allied bombing of Hiroshima. It would be interesting to hear Mr Putin's tame historians debate the Stalin era with Mr Gellately.

Mr Gellately sets a high standard for anyone writing about comparative dictatorship. But perhaps some future scholar, matching this author's knowledge of German and Soviet history but possessing equal mastery of China's communist decades, could write a more complete account of 20th-century horrors, including that missing monster, Mao Zedong.

Georgia and the mysterious missile

Europe.view

Under the umbrella
Aug 9th 2007
From Economist.com


Why Georgia must join NATO


IT IS a fair bet that if Georgia were in NATO the missile that hit the village of Tsitelubani on the evening of August 6th would never have been fired.

The Russian view seems to be that on this and other occasions the Georgians have been inventing tales about bombing, or even bombing themselves, in order to attract western sympathy. Georgia says that two Russian Sukhoi Su-24 attack aircraft entered its airspace from Russia, fired a Raduga Kh-58 air-to-surface missile (which failed to explode) and left.

Russia insists that nothing of the kind happened. It is of course theoretically possible that Georgia is engaged in an elaborate bluff involving secret planes, faked debris, forged radar logs and diplomatic histrionics.

But it is startlingly unlikely. After all, it would be hard to conceal such a ploy from the many American and other foreign military advisers based there. If Georgia is to have a chance of persuading unenthusiastic NATO members like Germany that the club needs to take in still more members, it needs to radiate responsibility, not pull stunts. The former, not the latter, is just what President Mikhail Saakashvili and his government have been doing.

Furthermore, if the attacks were faked to whip up outside support for Georgia, they have failed miserably. In March, a mysterious raid by nightflying attack helicopters rocketed public buildings in villages in the Kodori Gorge, a region of the breakaway region of Abkhazia where Georgia has reestablished its rule. The western response was almost inaudible.

Investigating that bombing—in which, luckily, nobody was killed—was shunted off to the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG), which monitors the Russian “peacekeeping” efforts in Abkhazia. UNOMIG's bureaucrats shuffled paper for three months and then produced a feebly inconclusive report.

Wherever the latest, seemingly abortive, attack was actually aimed, it has also produced alarmingly little Western support. That may be because it is August, and most decision-makers are on their holidays. But if the result is to show for a second time that Georgia is rather isolated, that will send a useful signal to the Kremlin about any future planned adventures in the region.

It may also be that Russia wants to derail Georgia’s new and successful approach towards reintegrating the smaller breakaway region of South Ossetia. A pro-Georgian parallel government has been unnerving the Kremlin-backed administration there.

Whatever the aim, it comes at a high price: mysterious air raids just across the border from the Olympic site of Sochi hardly fit the image of stability and dependability that Russia is trying to promote. As with many other events in the Caucasus, the real explanation may lie in the Kremlin's internal power struggles, not in geopolitics or diplomacy.

The underlying lesson though is that Georgia should be in NATO sooner rather than later. Even the most paranoid Russian would presumably admit that once in the alliance, Georgia would have little need to bomb itself. NATO expansion calms things down: that is the lesson of the Baltic states, which joined—in the teeth of Russian objections—in 2004. None of Russia’s warnings about the effect of NATO expansion into the “former Soviet Union” have proved true. The Baltic region is more stable now, not less, as a result (and things would be still better if Finland and Sweden joined too).

If Georgia were in NATO, it would also be less likely that Russia would want to bomb it. It is one thing to try to intimidate a neighbour in a security grey-zone. It is another to jostle someone sheltered by (and contributing to) the Western security umbrella, however stretched and faded its canopy may be.

more arctic monkeys

The Arctic

Gold rush under the ice

Aug 3rd 2007
From Economist.com

Russia wants a vast slice of the Arctic

AFP

RUSSIA’s foray into the Arctic is an audacious geopolitical adventure, as popular at home as it is troubling for outsiders. At stake are the region’s natural riches, until now frozen both in law and in nature. But global warming is making them look more accessible. They may include 10 billion tonnes of oil and gas deposits, tin, manganese, gold, nickel, lead, platinum and diamonds, plus fish and perhaps even lucrative freight routes. Exploiting them will be technically tricky, and is probably decades away. But as the ice melts, the row is hotting up about who owns what’s underneath it.

The five Arctic Circle countries—America, Canada, Denmark (which looks after Greenland’s interests), Norway and Russia—each have a 200 mile (322km) “economic zone” allowed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Russia argued in 2001 that its continental shelf stretched out into the Arctic, entitling it to a larger chunk. The UN said it needed more evidence.

That is what this week’s expedition, led by Russia’s most glamorous explorer, Artur Chilingarov, is trying to prove. By taking rock samples from the seabed, it hopes to arm Russian scientists with proof that the Lomonosov Ridge, an underwater mountain chain, is a continuation of Russia’s landmass.

That would allow the Kremlin to annex a 460,000 square mile wedge of territory, roughly the size of western Europe, between Russia’s northern coastline and the North Pole. Such international maritime-border wrangles normally progress at a snail's pace, and are stupefyingly boring. When Denmark allocated $25m in 2004 to try to prove that the Lomonosov Ridge was connected to Greenland, few noticed or cared.

But the latest Russian expedition is not just collecting geological samples; on Thursday August 2nd it placed the Russian flag (in titanium) on the yellow gravel 4,200 metres below the surface at the site of the North Pole. That was the first manned mission there, mounted by a polar flotilla that no other country could match. A mighty nuclear-powered icebreaker shepherded a research vessel that launched hi-tech mini-submarines capable of pinpoint navigation under the Arctic ice.

For outsiders used to stories of Russian bungling and backwardness, that was a salutary reminder of the world-class technical clout and human genius the Kremlin can still command.

Even more startling, though, was Russia’s rhetoric. “The Arctic is ours and we should manifest our presence,” said Mr Chilingarov, a charismatic figure whom President Vladimir Putin has named as “presidential envoy” to the Arctic. “This is like placing a flag on the moon” said Russia’s Arctic and Antarctic Institute.

The stunt has no legal force. But it still scandalised Canada’s foreign minister, Peter MacKay. “This isn’t the 15th century,” he complained. “You can’t go around the world and just plant flags and say ‘We’re claiming this territory’.” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, insisted that his country was doing nothing of the kind. But Andrei Kokoshin, chair of a parliamentary committee on the ex-Soviet region, said Russia “will have to actively defend its interests in the Arctic”, adding: “There is something to think about on the military side as well. We need to reinforce our Northern Fleet and our border guards and build airfields so that we can ensure full control.”

Canada, punily defended since the end of the cold war, is now planning to spend $7 billion on eight new Arctic patrol vessels. America’s Congress is considering spending $100m to update three ageing polar icebreakers and build two more.

But the biggest change may be in America’s attitude to international law. A small but vocal lobby that objects to international administration of seabed mining has so far blocked the Bush administration’s attempts to have the Convention on the Law of the Sea ratified by Congress. But even the most die-hard American freemarketeer may have to accept that international bureaucrats are a better bet than the Kremlin’s crony capitalists when it comes to getting a fair slice of the polar action.

Arctic monkeys

Europe.view

Stirring the pot

Aug 2nd 2007
From Economist.com

Geology not ethnography is the problem

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“ETHNOGRAPHICALLY, it’s ours.” This was one of the most dismal phrases of the early 1990s, as countries freed by the cold war’s end explored their buried history and geography. Sometimes it made tragic if impractical sense. Nationalistic Finns (previously thought to be an extinct species) explained the legal case for recovering Karelia from Russia. Hungarians gloomily analysed the borders drawn by the Treaty of Trianon. Poles insisted that at least half of Belarus was really theirs, while Belarusians laid confident claim to all the lands of the ancient Grand Duchy, stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Estonians and Latvians mourned slivers of lost territories (while not actually wanting them back: they are now mostly Russian-populated). Lithuanians hurriedly changed the subject: it was the Soviet occupation that returned their capital, Vilnius, from Poland and their seaport, Klaipeda, from Germany. Ukrainians explained that Kievan Rus had nothing to do with Russia, while Russians asked, reasonably, how Nash Krim (our Crimea) had ended up in Ukraine thanks to a Kremlin pen-stroke three decades previously. The Crimean Tatars pointed out (with even greater justice) that the balmy peninsular was theirs long before it was Russia’s.

For all the sentiment and heartbreak, the arguments were dangerous, even lethal, as Yugoslavia’s tragic disintegration proved. Some never stopped their poisonous bubbling. Is Kosovo “ethnographically” Albanian because of its recent past (recent in this context meaning a century’s worth of history), or Serbian because of its role in the Middle Ages?

But the great unsung triumphs of the 1990s were the conflicts that did not happen; these dwarfed the few that did. The desire to look respectable to outsiders trumped the desire to swagger in front of voters. Hungary and Romania buried the hatchet. The Czechs and Slovaks never quarrelled seriously about the divided villages on their (previously unimportant) border. Lithuanians and Poles became best friends. Germans digested the “new federal states” released by the collapse of the Soviet-occupied German Democratic Republic and stopped hankering after Silesia and Königsberg. The new rule was that nobody with historical quarrels outstanding could join the European Union or NATO. And it has worked marvellously.

AFP

A rabble-rouser in Moscow

But nothing is more dangerous to a great achievement than complacency. As EU expansion stalls and its willpower weakens, old squabbles are returning. Romania should be best friends with Moldova. Instead the two countries (or at least their presidents) have been indulging in a pointless game of historical tit-for-tat. There are low-level rows between Croatia and Slovenia, and between Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Russia has already shown it can stir things up in Estonia—this spring it encouraged a riot over a war memorial in Tallinn. In Ukraine, Crimea could be an even nastier mess: it has Russian nationalists plus a Kremlin naval base and increasingly cross Muslims (Tatars, whose patience has got them nowhere) including a small but ominous Islamist presence. Even if Ukraine had a strong and sensible government, the situation would be tricky. And amid the current mess in national politics, a smouldering problem could blaze up (or be stoked) all too quickly.

Certainly no one should rely on the Kremlin wanting to behave nicely, as it mostly did in the Yeltsin era. Russia’s new submarine expedition to claim the North Pole (or at least a chunk of territory the size of western Europe running up to it) is a clear sign of a newly assertive foreign policy. Countries such as Canada and Denmark (which handles foreign affairs for the 50,000 inhabitants of Greenland) are scrambling to protect their interests. Thankfully, this row is about geology, not ethnography, and affects more polar bears than people. But the same approach applied elsewhere could be incendiary.

Nashi sex camp shock horror--latest lurid plug for book

27/07/07 - News section

Sex for the motherland: Russian youths encouraged to procreate at camp
By EDWARD LUCAS

Remember the mammoths, say the clean-cut organisers at the youth camp's mass wedding. "They became extinct because they did not have enough sex. That must not happen to Russia".

Obediently, couples move to a special section of dormitory tents arranged in a heart-shape and called the Love Oasis, where they can start procreating for the motherland.

With its relentlessly upbeat tone, bizarre ideas and tight control, it sounds like a weird indoctrination session for a phoney religious cult.

But this organisation - known as "Nashi", meaning "Ours" - is youth movement run by Vladimir Putin's Kremlin that has become a central part of Russian political life.

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Nashi's annual camp, 200 miles outside Moscow, is attended by 10,000 uniformed youngsters and involves two weeks of lectures and physical fitness.

Attendance is monitored via compulsory electronic badges and anyone who misses three events is expelled. So are drinkers; alcohol is banned. But sex is encouraged, and condoms are nowhere on sale.

Bizarrely, young women are encouraged to hand in thongs and other skimpy underwear - supposedly a cause of sterility - and given more wholesome and substantial undergarments.

Twenty-five couples marry at the start of the camp's first week and ten more at the start of the second. These mass weddings, the ultimate expression of devotion to the motherland, are legal and conducted by a civil official.

Attempting to raise Russia's dismally low birthrate even by eccentric-seeming means might be understandable. Certainly, the country's demographic outlook is dire. The hard-drinking, hardsmoking and disease-ridden population is set to plunge by a million a year in the next decade.

But the real aim of the youth camp - and the 100,000-strong movement behind it - is not to improve Russia's demographic profile, but to attack democracy.

Under Mr Putin, Russia is sliding into fascism, with state control of the economy, media, politics and society becoming increasingly heavy-handed. And Nashi, along with other similar youth movements, such as 'Young Guard', and 'Young Russia', is in the forefront of the charge.

At the start, it was all too easy to mock. I attended an early event run by its predecessor, 'Walking together', in the heart of Moscow in 2000. A motley collection of youngsters were collecting 'unpatriotic' works of fiction for destruction.

It was sinister in theory, recalling the Nazis' book-burning in the 1930s, but it was laughable in practice. There was no sign of ordinary members of the public handing in books (the copies piled on the pavement had been brought by the organisers).

Once the television cameras had left, the event organisers admitted that they were not really volunteers, but being paid by "sponsors". The idea that Russia's anarchic, apathetic youth would ever be attracted into a disciplined mass movement in support of their president - what critics called a "Putinjugend", recalling the "Hitlerjugend" (German for "Hitler Youth") - seemed fanciful.

How wrong we were. Life for young people in Russia without connections is a mixture of inadequate and corrupt education, and a choice of boring dead-end jobs. Like the Hitler Youth and the Soviet Union's Young Pioneers, Nashi and its allied movements offer not just excitement, friendship and a sense of purpose - but a leg up in life, too.

Nashi's senior officials - known, in an eerie echo of the Soviet era, as "Commissars" - get free places at top universities. Thereafter, they can expect good jobs in politics or business - which in Russia nowadays, under the Kremlin's crony capitalism, are increasingly the same thing.

Nashi and similar outfits are the Kremlin's first line of defence against its greatest fear: real democracy. Like the sheep chanting "Four legs good, two legs bad" in George Orwell's Animal Farm, they can intimidate through noise and numbers.

Nashi supporters drown out protests by Russia's feeble and divided democratic opposition and use violence to drive them off the streets.

The group's leaders insist that the only connection to officialdom is loyalty to the president. If so, they seem remarkably well-informed.

In July 2006, the British ambassador, Sir Anthony Brenton, infuriated the Kremlin by attending an opposition meeting. For months afterwards, he was noisily harassed by groups of Nashi supporters demanding that he "apologise". With uncanny accuracy, the hooligans knew his movements in advance - a sign of official tip-offs.

Even when Nashi flagrantly breaks the law, the authorities do not intervene. After Estonia enraged Russia by moving a Soviet-era war memorial in April, Nashi led the blockade of Estonia's Moscow embassy. It daubed the building with graffiti, blasted it with Stalin-era military music, ripped down the Estonian flag and attacked a visiting ambassador's car. The Moscow police, who normally stamp ruthlessly on public protest, stood by.

Nashi fits perfectly into the Kremlin's newly-minted ideology of "Sovereign democracy". This is not the mind-numbing jargon of Marxism-Leninism, but a lightweight collection of cliches and slogans promoting Russia's supposed unique political and spiritual culture.

It is strongly reminiscent of the Tsarist era slogan: "Autocracy, Orthodoxy and Nationality".

The similarities to both the Soviet and Tsarist eras are striking. Communist ideologues once spent much of their time explaining why their party deserved its monopoly of power, even though the promised utopia seemed indefinitely delayed.

Today, the Kremlin's ideology chief Vladislav Surkov is trying to explain why questioning the crooks and spooks who run Russia is not just mistaken, but treacherous.

Yet, by comparison with other outfits, Nashi looks relatively civilised. Its racism and prejudice is implied, but not trumpeted. Other pro-Kremlin youth groups are hounding gays and foreigners off the streets of Moscow. Mestnye [The Locals] recently distributed leaflets urging Muscovites to boycott non-Russian cab drivers.

These showed a young blonde Russian refusing a ride from a swarthy, beetle-browed taxi driver, under the slogan: "We're not going the same way."

Such unofficial xenophobia matches the official stance. On April 1, a decree explicitly backed by Mr Putin banned foreigners from trading in Russia's retail markets. By some estimates, 12m people are working illegally in Russia.

Those who hoped that Russia's first post-totalitarian generation would be liberal, have been dissapointed. Although explicit support for extremist and racist groups is in the low single figures, support for racist sentiments is mushrooming.

Slogans such as "Russia for the Russians" now attract the support of half of the population. Echoing Kremlin propaganda, Nashi denounced Estonians as "fascist", for daring to say that they find Nazi and Soviet memorials equally repugnant. But, in truth, it is in Russia that fascism is all too evident.

The Kremlin sees no role for a democratic opposition, denouncing its leaders as stooges and traitors. Sadly, most Russians agree: a recent poll showed that a majority believed that opposition parties should not be allowed to take power.

Just as the Nazis in 1930s rewrote Germany's history, the Putin Kremlin is rewriting Russia's. It has rehabilitated Stalin, the greatest mass-murderer of the 20th century. And it is demonising Boris Yeltsin, Russia's first democratically-elected president. That he destroyed totalitarianism is ignored. Instead, he is denounced for his "weak" pro-Western policies.

While distorting its own history, the Kremlin denounces other countries. Mr Putin was quick to blame Britain's "colonial mentality" for our government's request that Russia try to find a legal means of extraditing Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

Yet the truth is that Britain, like most Western countries, flagellates itself for the crimes of the past. Indeed, British schoolchildren rarely learn anything positive about their country's empire. And, if Mr Putin has his way, Russian pupils will learn nothing bad about the Soviet empire, which was far bloodier, more brutal - and more recent.

A new guide for history teachers - explicitly endorsed by Mr Putin - brushes off Stalin's crimes. It describes him as "the most successful leader of the USSR". But it skates over the colossal human cost - 25m people were shot and starved in the cause of communism.

"Political repression was used to mobilise not only rank-and-file citizens but also the ruling elite," it says. In other words, Stalin wanted to make the country strong, so he may have been a bit harsh at times. At any time since the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism in the late 1980s, that would have seemed a nauseating whitewash. Now, it is treated as bald historical fact.

If Stalin made mistakes, so what? Lots of people make mistakes.

"Problematic pages in our history exist," Mr Putin said last week. But: "we have less than some countries. And ours are not as terrible as those of some others." He compared the Great Terror of 1937, when 700,000 people were murdered in a purge by Stalin's secret police, to the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

The comparison is preposterous. A strong argument can be made that by ending the war quickly, the atom bombs saved countless lives.

Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman may have failed to realise that nuclear weapons would one day endanger humanity's survival. But, unlike Stalin, they were not genocidal maniacs.

As the new cold war deepens, Mr Putin echoes, consciously or unconsciously, the favourite weapon of Soviet propagandists in the last one.

Asked about Afghanistan, they would cite Vietnam. Castigated for the plight of Soviet Jews, they would complain with treacly sincerity about discrimination against American blacks. Every blot on the Soviet record was matched by something, real or imagined, that the West had done.

But the contrasts even then were absurd. When the American administration blundered into Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of people protested in the heart of Washington. When eight extraordinarily brave Soviet dissidents tried to demonstrate in Red Square against the invasion of Czechoslovakia, in 1968, they were instantly arrested and spent many years in labour camps.

For the east European countries with first-hand experience of Stalinist terror, the Kremlin's rewriting of history could hardly be more scary. Not only does Russia see no reason to apologise for their suffering under Kremlin rule, it now sees the collapse of communism not as a time of liberation, but as an era of pitiable weakness.

Russia barely commemorates even the damage it did to itself, let alone the appalling suffering inflicted on other people. Nashi is both a symptom of the way Russia is going - and a means of entrenching the drift to fascism.

Terrifyingly, the revived Soviet view of history is now widely held in Russia. A poll this week of Russian teenagers showed that a majority believe that Stalin did more good things than bad.

If tens of thousands of uniformed German youngsters were marching across Germany in support of an authoritarian Führer, baiting foreigners and praising Hitler, alarm bells would be jangling all across Europe. So why aren't they ringing about Nashi?

Edward Lucas is author of the forthcoming The New Cold War And How To Win It

make benefit glorious OSCE not Kazakhstan

Europe.view

Security versus democracy

Jul 26th 2007
From Economist.com

Kazakhstan is at the centre of an ugly trade

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IF YOU believe in realpolitik, it is a no-brainer. Kazakhstan should chair the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2009. If you believe in the principles of democracy on which the OSCE was founded, the question of Kazakhstan is a no-brainer too: an undemocratic country should not chair one of the continent’s main democracy-promoting organisation.

This is no mere wrangle about protocol. The debate over Kazakhstan and the OSCE raises a fundamental question about Europe’s willingness to trade democracy for security.

The OSCE was founded on that bargain—but the other way round. The then Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe, meeting in Helsinki in 1975, traded security, in the form of Western assent to the division of Europe, for freedom: the Kremlin’s formal commitment to support human rights across the continent. That helped destroy totalitarianism, because it gave dissidents behind the iron curtain a legal basis to challenge their communist rulers.

Now Russia and its allies want to cripple the OSCE until it turns into a mere talking-shop. They have systematically tried to strangle its election-monitoring outfit, the Warsaw-based Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR—pronounced, aptly enough, “oh dear”). The Kremlin also detests the OSCE’s openness to independent non-governmental organisations. The OSCE is one of the few places where outfits such as the Russian-Chechen Friendship Society (banned in Russia but now registered in Finland) can get a public hearing before an official audience.

The chairmanship of the 56-member OSCE changes every year. Spain holds the chair now; Finland is next. Kazakhstan desperately desires the job in 2009. Giving Kazakhstan what it wants, argue supporters such as Germany, would help reach out to the most important and promising country in central Asia. It would integrate Kazakhstan into the heart of Europe’s security structures—and maybe gain Kazakh support for a gas pipeline direct from central Asia to Europe, bypassing Russia.

AFP

For make benefit glorious nation

Perhaps. But it is hard to portray this as a move to counter Russian influence in central Asia, given that the Kremlin also strongly supports the Kazakh bid. Russia wants to set a precedent that a non-democratic country can hold the chair. This year Kazakhstan, so why not Belarus in 2010?

Britain and America are still holding out against the plan. Kazakhstan’s human-rights record is dire. It has never held an internationally validated election. Nursultan Nazarbayev (pictured), the president for 17 years already, has just claimed the post for life. Leaders in Washington and London fear that Kazakhstan may mute the OSCE’s effectiveness if, say, an election is rigged, a demonstration violently crushed or a journalist killed somewhere in Russia or another part of the former Soviet Union in 2009; judging from current affairs, such events are all too likely.

Certainly the evidence so far is that stretching democratic principles to accommodate undemocratic countries does not spread freedom, but merely dents those principles. Admitting Russia to the Council of Europe, another talking-shop with a grand human-rights mandate, now looks premature to say the least. The same applies to the G8, supposedly a grouping of big advanced democracies. Official harassment of pro-democracy protesters made Russia’s G8 summit in St Petersburg last year a shameful farce.

One solution would be to say that Kazakhstan can be chair in 2011—but only if it first meets some elementary democratic criteria. But it may be too late for such a deal. Anything short of the chairmanship in 2009 will be seen as a severe snub.

The sad truth is that an organisation like the OSCE can function only if its members mostly agree on most principles. That was the case through the 1990s. It no longer holds now. Rather than make shameful compromises in the name of security, it would be better to concentrate on the best long-term bet: promoting freedom.

Berezovsky

19/07/07 - World news section

No wonder Boris Berezovsky has so many enemies
By EDWARD LUCAS

Plenty of people have wanted to kill Boris Berezovsky. Personally, I wanted to strangle him. In the chaotic Russia of the 1990s, he was the epitome of the 'oligarchs': the profiteers from a no-holds-barred capitalism that had created a handful of billionaires while leaving millions of Russians destitute.

But even by Russia's demanding standards of unpunctuality and indiscipline, he was chaotic.

His office habitually denied all knowledge of his whereabouts. His mobile phone numbers - he had several - changed constantly. With luck, you would reach a bodyguard, who would take a note with your name into the tycoon's presence.

{R}

Berezovsky would either shake his head wordlessly, or - if you were very lucky - take the phone, offering anything between a minute and an hour; or the promise of a meeting; sometimes it would even happen.

His favourite meeting place was what he called his "club" (though it seemed to have only one member). This was a lavishly-restored and closely-guarded Tsarist-era mansion where he liked to show off the exquisite materials and workmanship.

The sources of Mr Berezovsky's money have never been entirely clear. Which explains, at least in part, why he is no longer a man of huge economic and political influence in his native land, but is living in exile in England, in permanent and justifiable fear of his life, travelling everywhere in one of his two armoured Maybach limousines (£400,000 each) and watched over by his protection team of former French Foreign Legionnaires.

Berezovsky likes to parade himself as a political dissident whose outspoken criticisms of President Putin's regime make him a true friend of democracy. That is not quite the full picture.

To understand the man and his motivations we need to travel back into his past, to a time when millions of Russians were trying their luck at business in the collapsing years of the Soviet Union.

Mr Berezovsky - a gifted mathematician - started as a dealer in cars, buying Ladas straight off the production line "for export" at a very favourable price and then selling them (without any export having taken place) at a profit.

How he managed to persuade the management of that run-down wreck of a factory to part with valuable stock at such a bargain price remains a mystery.

That business financed other ventures. Next came a scheme selling bargain-priced shares in a planned car factory. It was never built; nobody got a car and the scheme collapsed, wiping out participants' savings. Mr Berezovsky insists that the scheme was honestly run, and its collapse was not his fault.

He next moved into the media business, taking effective control of the main television channel, ORT, and purchasing a clutch of heavyweight newspapers. He also gained control of an oil company and became an influential force in the Russian national airline, Aeroflot, setting up a Swiss-based company to handle - and critics say to siphon off - its foreign-currency revenues.

As his business empire expanded, so his political influence soared. His office in the "White House", the seat of Russian government, adjoined that of the then prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin.

He was supremely well-connected in the Kremlin too, where an increasingly drunken and frail President Boris Yeltsin had given free rein to his daughter, Tatyana, and her husband.

As the Yeltsin family cast around for a successor who would keep them out of jail, it was Mr Berezovsky who pushed the case of a quiet, ex-KGB-man-turned bureaucrat, called Vladimir Putin.

He was unashamed about his abilities to turn power into wealth and vice versa. Although he insisted that he wanted Russia to become a modern democracy, it was hard to see his practical contribution-to this and outsiders who did business-with him were less impressed.

In 1999, at Moscow's leading investment conference, I watched Mr Berezovsky facing unaccustomed scrutiny from a western fund manager.

"Can you name any company you have been involved with where the cash flow has not been siphoned off and the other investors defrauded?" asked the irate banker. "Come on, sir, just name one."

Such fury had long been shared by the vast majority of Russians. In their eyes, Berezovsky symbolised the looting and influence-peddling that had so marred the Yeltsin era.

As such, he had many enemies. A car bomb in 1994 nearly killed him. And when Mr Putin began bringing a semblance of order to Russian politics after becoming president in 2000, Mr Berezovsky was an obvious target.

Berezovsky had made the fatal mistake of assuming that Mr Putin would be a weak president, who would not dare challenge the business empire of a fromer poitical ally.

He was wrong. In the summer of 2000, when Mr Putin first unleashed the prosecutor's office on him, Mr Berezovsky responded toughly, claiming that dictatorship was looming. Few sympathised with him.

In a few months, he had lost his most important assets. His television channel, ORT, was back in government control. Prosecutors and accountants were poring over the books at Aeroflot.

So Mr Berezovsky moved to London - taking up a promise made by the British government in 1998 when he brokered the release of two British hostages in Chechnya.

For all the luxury of his Mayfair offices and Surrey mansion, it is unlikely that Mr Berezovsky planned a long stay.

But like many Russian emigres in past centuries who kept suitcase packed for their imminent return home, it has been much postponed.

Mr Berezovsky's frequent entreaties against the Kremlin have come to nothing. Opposition parties shun his advances. His associates were mostly fringe figures such as Alexander Litvinenko, a renegade officer of the Russian security service, whose escape from Russia was facilitated by Mr Berezovsky.

As the world now knows, Mr Litvinenko was subsequently murdered after his cup of tea was poisoned with radioactive polonium in a London hotel, triggering the current diplomatic stand-off between Britain and Russia.

If, as some suspect, this assassination was meant to send a warning signal to Mr Berezovsky to halt his political rabble-rousing against the Kremlin, then it has had precisely the opposite effect. His pronouncements have become increasingly shrill.

He told a British newspaper that he wanted to remove Russia's rulers "by force" - infuriating the British government. At a recent debate at London's Frontline club, Mr Berezovsky kept Russia-watchers, journalists, spooks and fellow-emigres transfixed with his demolition of his native country's lethal fusion of business and political power, enforced by secret police tactics.

But a sardonic intervention from the audience left him - for once - speechless. "You have well described the monster that runs Russia. But it is one that you yourself created."

Mr Berezovsky's analysis may indeed be hypocritical, but it is still largely correct. And while he may be a difficult man to admire, if the Russian authorities have indeed tried to kill him, there could be little more convincing proof of the terrifying contempt in which the Kremlin holds our way of life.

Edward Lucas is author of a forthcoming book The New Cold War And How To Win It.

The BBC "Kowtows" to the Kremlin

Europe.view

The BBC's alleged kowtow
Jul 19th 2007
From Economist.com


Arguing over the coverage of the Litvinenko murder

WHEN people like this complain, you take notice. Vladimir Bukovsky spent 12 years in Soviet prison camps before being deported in 1976. Oleg Gordievsky was Britain’s top defector from the KGB. Both are British citizens. So was their friend, Alexander Litvinenko.

They and other cold-war veterans have written a letter this month expressing their alarm at the BBC Russian service’s coverage of Litvinenko’s murder. The victim, speaking from his deathbed in November, blamed the Kremlin for his radiation poisoning. Russia, of course, insists that the murder was staged by its enemies (chiefly Boris Berezovsky, an exiled billionaire businessman and arch-critic of the Kremlin).

The BBC management is right to be careful when covering sensitive stories. Russia regards Mr Berezovsky as a criminal. It also wants Britain to extradite Ahmed Zakayev, another exile, who represents the remnants of the elected pre-war Chechen government. Russia insists he is a terrorist (though the soft-spoken actor has always denounced terrorist outrages perpetrated in the name of his cause).

But caution is one thing. Pusillanimity is another. The Russian service’s coverage of the Litvinenko story, the complaint goes, largely ignored Messrs Bukovsky, Gordievsky, and Zakayev. That seems odd. They all knew Litvinenko well. They have made powerful arguments about his death, what it says about the Kremlin under Vladimir Putin, and how Britain should react.

One programme from the Russian service did use extensive clips of all three men. But it was repeated only once (normally it would have gone out around five times); it disappeared from the website after only two days, instead of the normal week. The producer, apparently, received a severe reprimand.

The BBC contests the complaint vigorously. It makes some reasonable points: it was to the BBC Russian service that Mr Litvinenko gave his last broadcast interview. Mr Zakayev also appeared in another programme. The signatories of the letter were interviewed, then and at other times. Yet there is a paradox: the interviews about the Litvinenko case that the BBC cites in its defence were for the very programme it is now disowning.

People who heard it say that it was punchy, and certainly gave a lot of space to the Kremlin’s critics (though it put the countervailing view as well). By the standards of the domestic BBC, that would be nothing unusual. But perhaps not by the standards of the Russian service, whose editors—at least in the view of many hawkish British-based listeners—have lately been erring on the side of caution. Annoyingly, the BBC declines to make a copy of the banned programme available so it is hard to judge whether its punchiness outweighed professional balance.

To those who worry that the Kremlin’s tentacles already reach dangerously far into Western institutions, the story has a dismal ring to it. They think the BBC’s twitchiness reflects its desire to hang on to its use of transmitters inside Russia. Several of these have already been cancelled by Russian authorities (though the difficulties predate the Litvinenko affair). Following Britain’s expulsion this week of four Russian diplomats, to protest against the Kremlin’s refusal to extradite the main suspect in the Litvinenko murder, the remaining frequencies may be at risk too. But what is the point of having broadcasts if you cannot broadcast freely? Russians have plenty of tame radio stations to listen to.

In the dark days of the cold war (when people like Mr Gordievsky were risking their lives for Britain) the BBC Russian service was both fair and incisive, a splendid contrast to the Soviet block’s propaganda stations. It would be disastrous if the service was now soft-pedalling its criticism of the Kremlin. The BBC bosses are energetically countering their critics, but seem untroubled that they have lost their confidence in the first place.

Daily Mail (rant)

12/07/07 - News section

We must be tough with Private Putin
by EDWARD LUCAS

How they must be trembling in the Kremlin. Britain is talking tough: a "withdrawal of cooperation" in education, social affairs or trade. Probably the first public expulsion of Russian diplomats since 1996.

Officials will dress this up as a strong response. But in truth it is preposterously feeble.

We have seen nuclear terrorism on the streets of London. The assassins used polonium-210, a rare radioactive isotope produced in a Russian government research institute.

They killed a UK citizen and endangered dozens more. Now Russia is brazenly refusing to extradite the prime suspect.

It is clear that Britain now officially accepts what many have been saying for months: that the FSB, the secret-police heirs to the KGB, connived in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko.

If the skull and crossbones were flying over the Kremlin, it could hardly be clearer: Russia under Vladimir Putin is a pirate state that unashamedly flaunts its contempt for the law.

It is no exaggeration to say that the FSB runs Russia: its former chief, Mr Putin, is the president. Its ruthless and greedy tentacles stretch across all corners of that vast land, high finance to the depths of organised crime.

It has throttled Russian democracy. It is gobbling up business. Now it is hunting down the Kremlin's foes abroad.

We should be responding to this outrage with a series of tough measures that will hit the Kremlin and its cronies hard.

Britain's first step should be the expulsion of not just a symbolic few, but every one of the dozens of FSB operatives here.

They range from a handful who are "declared", working openly at Russia's embassy and Edinburgh consulate as liaison with British counterparts.

The more sinister ones pretend to be cooks and drivers there.

At the Aeroflot check-in back to Moscow they can meet their deep-cover colleagues: those pretending to be businessmen and students.

Some expulsions may, indeed, have already happened. Sources say they were kept quiet in order not to escalate the row with Russia.

If so, that was typical official spinelessness: we should be trumpeting our fury from the rooftops of Whitehall, not sparing the Kremlin's blushes. We should stop giving Russia's rulers visas to come here.

They enjoy the spoils of power at home while they invest in Britain, their wives shop here, and their children go to our finest private schools. They must realise that welcome is cancelled for accomplices in murder.

British banks and businesses must realise the risks of gobbling Russian bait. The heads of Britain's biggest companies recently paid grotesque homage to Mr Putin at an economic forum in St Petersburg in June.

They included BP and Shell, seemingly undeterred by having had their best assets in Russia snatched by the Kremlin's business allies.

Tony Blair had just warned British firms about the political risks of Russia. Yet scandalously, our captains of industry toed the Kremlin line, that Mr Blair's warning was the "emotional outburst of an ex-prime minister".

Not since British trades unionists went to the Kremlin in the 1980s to praise the peace-loving Soviet leadership and denounce the "war-mongers" Thatcher and Reagan have I felt more ashamed. The bleak truth is that we again have a fifth column in this country.

During the last Cold War it was the communist trade unionists, who with their "peace movement" allies used the Kremlin's secret funding to undermine our democracy and our defences.

Now the fifth column wear pinstripes, not overalls. The 30 silver roubles that fuels their treachery is not smuggled, but highlighted in the top line of their annual report and accounts.

Selling lorryloads of stolen goods in the streets of the City of London would be stopped even by our paperwork-swamped

No compromises: Vladimir Putin police. Yet Russian companies that have looted their rivals and defrauded their shareholders are allowed to raise money on the London Stock Exchange.

Our American allies now deny visas to dodgy tycoons and have toughened the rules for Russian companies wanting to list their shares in New York. But London's financial markets have become a colossal car boot sale for the crony capitalists of the Kremlin.

The grim pattern is repeated across Europe. Our influence on Russia is swamped by the Kremlin's clout inside the West.

Its energy companies' investments create a formidable bridgehead. Germany's gutsy Chancellor, Angela Merkel, longs to be tough with Mr Putin, a man she loathes. But her own party's influential business backers are holding her back.

We must stop Gazprom and other statebacked Russian energy companies buying our companies until Russia abides by the rule of law. That day is a long way off.

Russia's increasingly menacing nuclear posturing gives the lie to any idea that a replacement for Trident is no longer necessary.

We need to upgrade our electronic security: the cyber-assault on Estonia in May was a grim warning of what awaits those who annoy the Kremlin.

Networks of thousands of computers - known as "botnets" - hijacked by organised criminals crashed many of that brave little country's most crucial websites, cutting off the outside world.

American and Nato specialists have been working intensively to learn the lessons of that attack. We risk being dangerously complacent.

The BBC must urgently investigate the scandalous pusillanimity of the Russian service, once an emblem of British liberty and now unwilling to interview Cold War heroes such as Oleg Gordievsky on the Litvinenko case for fear of losing their transmitters in Russia.

It is worrying that Gordon Brown's close advisers include no one with real knowledge of Russia, now the world's largest rogue state.

Britain has the chance to lead Europe in resolute resistance to the Kremlin's xenophobic and authoritarian regime. Let us hope our new prime minister does not flinch from the challenge.

Edward Lucas is the author of a forthcoming book, The New Cold War And How To Win It


©2007 Associated New Media

Ugly ducklings(but one is clever)

Poland's unsteady government

Crash, bang, fizzle

Jul 12th 2007 | WARSAW
From The Economist print edition

The ruling coalition wobbles, but survives for now

OUTSIDERS often mock Poland's prickly, obstinate prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski. But a collapse of his government, followed by months of instability, might be worse. An anti-corruption watchdog this week named a deputy prime minister, the temperamental farmers' leader Andrzej Lepper, in a bribery scandal. Mr Kaczynski promptly sacked him (for the second time).

Mr Lepper, who denies any wrongdoing, threatened to take his party, Self-Defence, out of the coalition. That would have meant minority rule and perhaps an early election, bogging down Poland's haphazard reforms completely. The European Union's most unpredictable member would be even harder to handle. But Self-Defence does not want an election campaign in which its already pungent reputation for cronyism might take centre stage. Fearing a revolt, Mr Lepper apparently backed down, suggesting his party may stay in the coalition “conditionally”.

Mr Kaczynski's Law and Justice Party may also want to defuse a row with its hardline Catholic supporters before facing voters. Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, who runs a highly politicised media empire, recently called Mr Kaczynski's sister-in-law a “witch” who deserved “euthanasia” because of her support for abortion. That prompted a rebuke from her husband, Lech Kaczynski, Jaroslaw's twin brother and Poland's president.

Law and Justice's embrace has proved near-fatal to the other coalition party, the nationalist League of Polish Families. It may now do the same for Self-Defence. Mr Kaczynski can thus safely go for an early election whenever he chooses. But his canny politicking is not matched by ability to govern. Attempts at health reform, for example, have brought doctors at more than 200 hospitals out on strike. Nurses demanding higher wages are camping in tents outside Mr Kaczynski's office. They say he has broken election pledges to help losers from the post-1989 transition, such as ill-paid public-sector workers.

The government has also failed to reform public finances, essential if Poland is to follow Cyprus and Malta into the euro (see article). Its main boasts are reforms in the intelligence services, stronger anti-corruption efforts and weeding out communist-era secret-police collaborators. These may have been worthwhile, but the government's approach has been highly partisan, even vengeful. Public administration is lamentably backward.

As the political system fails to reflect Poles' exasperation with their poor quality of life, many are voting with their feet. Some 2m have gone abroad since Poland joined the EU, and a recent survey found another 3m planning to do the same. This is aggravating labour shortages that may undermine the country's competitiveness.

Poland's foreign policy is also being mismanaged. At the recent EU summit, Mr Kaczynski won a delay on new voting rules that will reduce Poland's weight. But the victory was marred by his graceless approach, using Poland's wartime suffering at German hands as a bargaining chip. It was Germany that pushed hardest for Poland's EU entry. Now German diplomats in Warsaw say relations cannot improve so long as the Kaczynskis are in power.

On the foreign front, things may get worse still. Law and Justice has just suspended its most sensible foreign-affairs expert, Pawel Zalewski. A deputy leader of the party, he dared to quiz the lightweight foreign minister, Anna Fotyga, at a parliamentary hearing. The disconnection between Poland and its EU partners was underlined when a Polish candidate to run the IMF was brushed aside. Both Poland and the EU would like to see a strong, dependable government in Warsaw. It may be some time before they get one.

energy security

Europe.view

A glimmer of hope

Jul 12th 2007
From Economist.com

The struggle for energy independence from Russia

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WESTERN failures in recent energy tussles with Russia have been persistent and spectacular. Key allies have drifted off into private deals. The big picture has been ignored. The gloomy drift accelerated this year with the signing of a three-cornered deal between Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to pump the Caspian’s huge gas reserves north through Russia. Now Uzbekistan, according to Russia’s Vladimir Putin, is going to join too.

Europe’s only chance of getting gas along pipelines that Russia doesn’t control is a project called Nabucco. Its aim is to connect the gas riches of the Caspian and the Middle East to Europe via the Caucasus and Turkey.

But Nabucco’s chances, never strong, are looking flimsier by the week. First, there doesn’t seem to be much gas to pump. It can’t come from Iran while the country wants to wipe Israel off the map. It can’t come from Iraq, for reasons too painful to mention in polite Euro-Atlantic company. None of the other Arab pipelines exists as more than a line on a map. Azerbaijan is willing to send gas, but doesn’t have very much. And the gas in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan is off-limits. Leaders there, understandably, show no sign of wanting to annoy the Kremlin just to help an indecisive, stingy and unfocussed Europe.

Worse, it is not clear that the countries the pipeline would pass through are interested. Turkey, having been snubbed by the European Union, has developed an alarmingly close relationship with Russia, particularly in the energy sector. That has already led to the building of Blue Stream, a pipeline across the Black Sea of astonishing technical merits and questionable economic ones. Only a fraction of its capacity is used. Now Russia wants to build another gas pipeline across the Black Sea, this time to the Balkans. That would completely kybosh Nabucco’s chances. Once one pipeline exists, it doesn’t make sense to build another one.

AFP

Inside Europe, it looks bleaker still. Governments in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania are all dubious about Nabucco.

But is that the clink of spurs from over the hill? Two men are riding to Europe’s rescue. One is Andris Piebalgs, the EU energy commissioner. He is tall and soft-spoken. His American counterpart and ally, Matt Bryza, is tall too. But he throws rocks. At a recent conference on energy security in Riga, much of the proceedings were a bit soporific: prepared statements read in heavy accents, with accompanying PowerPoint slides. But Mr Bryza was a showstopper. When a Russian representative promoted the Baltic gas pipeline on ecological grounds, Mr Bryza intervened forcefully, pointing out that in the Caspian, Russia is arguing that undersea gas pipelines are dangerous.

Both men insist that Europe’s predicament is not as bad as it seems. The thinking goes broadly like this: Turkey has no desire to be dependent on Russia for all its gas. So despite Europe’s sticks, and Russia’s carrots, Ankara will probably support anything that diversifies its gas supplies. Second, Azerbaijan has enough gas to get Nabucco going, if not to make it pay its way in the long term. And by the time the gasline is built, who knows, Iran may be back in the civilised world. Third, someone has given the Hungarian government a stiff talking to and the prime minister, Ferenc Gyurcsany, will give a speech at a conference in September strongly endorsing Nabucco.

It is uplifting stuff. But the striking oddity is that just as in the last cold war, Europe’s security still depends so much on the Americans. Mr Bryza is taking on Russia’s energy monolith in single-handed mortal combat, because faraway America sees Europe’s problems with proper clarity. And then as now, most European governments are childishly unfocussed—and ungrateful.

cee boom and bust

Eastern Europe's economies

Worrying about a crash

Jul 5th 2007 | RIGA
From The Economist print edition

Peter Schrank

East European economies are still powering along—but the region is ill-prepared if the weather turns nasty

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IMAGINE some souped-up old bangers driven confidently but not expertly on a smooth road in fine weather. That is the economic picture of the ten east European countries that are now in the European Union. If the road gets wet or slippery, bad brakes and bald tyres make a crash, even a pile-up, horribly likely.

The country that most troubles outsiders is Latvia. It has a whopping current-account deficit: some 21% of GDP in 2006, and bigger still so far this year. That reflects soaring consumption and household debt, financed mainly by foreign-owned banks. Wages are rocketing—up by a third year-on-year. Inflation is over 8%.

This points to a need for tough restraining measures. But the currency, the lats, is pegged to the euro, so the central bank's ability to raise interest rates is constrained. Although the IMF issued a sharp warning in May about the need for a fiscal squeeze, the government is keener on harvesting the dividends of double-digit GDP growth than on acting to avert the risk of a crash.

Aware of the dangers, the banks, mainly Swedish-owned, are reining in lending. Their share prices wobbled during a brief financial crisis in February. Prudent behaviour by the banks may amount to a monetary tightening on its own. Other modest measures include making tax declarations a mandatory part of loan applications, deterring those with undeclared wealth. A speculative attack on the lats may tempt some, but it is tricky to organise in Latvia's puny financial markets.

Latvia is a financial pipsqueak, with only 0.2% of the euro area's GDP. If it does run off the road—for example, if it is forced to unpeg its currency—the main victims will be local borrowers and foreigners who have lent to them (in theory, but probably not in practice, Western banks could refuse to bail out local subsidiaries, even if their loan books shrivelled). Any crash in the Baltics is unlikely to affect outsiders' views of other regional economies. The likeliest route for contagion would be to next-door Estonia. It is also overheating, but its somewhat more responsible government has a modest budget surplus.

The other early candidate for a crash has long been Hungary, which admitted last year that it had been running a budget deficit of 10% of GDP. But a combination of tax rises and modest spending cuts has trimmed the deficit. Exports and industrial production have risen. The central bank has begun to cut interest rates. Hungary has been “disgustingly lucky”, says Juliet Sampson of HSBC, a bank.

Even if a pile-up is avoided, overheating is still undesirable. As euro members like Portugal have found, a boom stoked by low interest rates and a fixed exchange rate can lead to a long period of uncompetitiveness and slow growth. Except for Slovenia, which is now in, none of the east European countries is likely to join the euro for some time—but they have mostly been able to borrow as cheaply as if they were already members.

So how to cool things down? For countries that can do it, keeping their interest rates above the euro's and letting their currencies appreciate helps. So does bringing in foreign workers from places such as Ukraine in order to reduce upward wage pressures. Slovakia is a prime example of how to pull off both tricks.

The only long-term answer is not to add coolant or to drive more slowly, but to fix up the car. Unfortunately the process of structural reform in the region has largely stopped. Fast growth in tax revenues plus weak political leadership makes for less pressure to get a grip on public finances. Poland and Romania, in particular, have proved alarmingly ready to make expensive spending pledges for political reasons.

A new World Bank study of public spending (see chart below) highlights the bad bargain that the region's taxpayers are getting. Almost everywhere, public spending is higher than it should be for middle-income developing economies. In Albania, the study finds that overstaffing, poor debt collection and wasteful management at the state-run water industry alone costs 1% of GDP. Despite the spread of flat taxes, the “tax wedge”, which includes social-security and other charges, can be as much as 40% of wages.

Changing this is a political matter, not an economic one. But the evidence is that voters do not much like reform. Reforming governments have usually lost the next elections. A report from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development shows that, in most of the region, only minorities of voters, and sometimes not even a plurality, support both a democracy and a market economy (many choose the “don't care” option instead).

Nor is there any obvious punishment for a failure to reform. Romania and Bulgaria have been backsliding ever since they joined the EU in January, and yet there have been only mild complaints from Brussels, which has lost the leverage that it had before the two countries' entry. Capital markets are accommodating too. The lesson that other countries take from Hungary's financial shenanigans is that it is possible to spend like crazy to win an election and then sober up afterwards.

That will change when global conditions make growth a hard scrabble, rather than a bonanza, and borrowing money means dealing with flinty-eyed sceptics, not rosy-eyed thrill-seekers. The politicians may then have to concentrate on the real sources of competitiveness: brains, hard work and clean government.