e-govt audio interview

You can here an Economist audio interview about my 12,000-word special report on e-government here

Daily Mail piece on Badri

Analysis: Fear of the super-rich Russian fugitives

By EDWARD LUCAS - More by this author » Last updated at 23:52pm on 13th February 2008

The scene would be a fitting start to a novel by John Le Carré. A mysterious foreign tycoon is found dead in his Surrey mansion. On the surface, it looks like a heart attack.

But within hours the fingers of suspicion are pointing to warlords from Chechnya, acting as contract killers, or to the ruthless and sophisticated assassins of the Kremlin.

It is a fair bet that until yesterday, few people in Britain had heard of Badri Patarkatsishvili, and even those who did hesitated before trying to pronounce his tongue-twisting name.

Genial and ruthless, he epitomised the world of post-Soviet business, where mysteriously-gained fortunes could be used to topple governments and settle scores.

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Friends under threat: Patarkatsishvili with Boris Berezovsky

Mr Le Carré might think it a plot twist too far, however, to put the investigation of a renegade Georgian tycoon in the hands of the Surrey Major Crimes Investigations Unit, more used to dealing with small-scale racketeering in Weybridge than international murder plots.

Even the sharpest Russia-watchers and spycatchers of Britain's security services, the latter-day heirs to George Smiley, find it hard to unravel the feuds, rivalries, interests and alliances of this country's ex-Soviet super-rich. And that's the way the oligarchs who have made their homes in Britain like to keep it.

Most guard their privacy jealously. Roman Abramovich, once the Kremlin's in-house banker but now only an occasional visitor to Russia, has a motto: "Money likes peace and quiet".

His famous reluctance to give interviews is in sharp contrast to his former friend, and now bitter foe, Boris Berezovsky.

Wanted for fraud in Russia, Berezovsky - who was with Patarkatsishvili on the day of his death - strikes many British officials as a nuisance because of his repeated attacks on Vladimir Putin and the ex-KGB officers now running Russia.

More typical are the rich Russians who arrive by private jet and are whisked from the VIP lounge to their closely-guarded mansions in Hampstead and Surrey.

They spend liberally on lawyers, PR men and financial advice - but if they have views on politics in Russia, or indeed anything else, they wisely keep their thoughts to themselves.

Russia's super-rich might like holidaying in France and banking in Geneva, but London is still by far their preferred place to live.

One reason is a strong - some might say quaint - belief in the ability of British justice to protect their property from seizure and themselves from extradition to Russia.

The Kremlin has repeatedly asked the British authorities to send Berezovsky back to stand trial but successive governments always say no.

The reason, it is rumoured, is that Berezovsky brokered a deal in 1999 to release two British hostages held in Chechnya.

In return, he was promised that should he need safety in Britain, he would have it, and Britain has honoured that pledge to the fury of the Kremlin.

To be on the safe side, the Russian Londonchiki (Londoners) employ the most advanced security systems money can buy.

Visits to their offices involve body searches, security scans and scrutiny by some of the best bodyguards in the world. Some are veterans of the French Foreign Legion. Other Russians prefer to buy British, opting for the understated menace of former SAS men.

The lifestyle that these muscular, taciturn watchers protect is both enviable and claustrophobic. Nothing is spontaneous: a restaurant visit means booking not one table but half the room, with lookouts posted at the door and in the kitchen. Favoured transport is the £500,000 Maybach limousine - with armour plating, bulletproof windows and independent air supply.

London is good for family life too: children can go to the top private schools (Millfield and Wellington for the dimmer ones, Winchester and Westminster for the brainboxes).

A new day school in Knightsbridge, central London, has opened on the specific promise of high security for the children of the super-rich.

Even so, some find any kind of schooling too risky for their offspring, opting for private tutors to the relief of many public-school headmasters who find the Russian clientele's lavish spending and disregard for rules a source of grief.

London is also becoming the world capital for glamorous Russian-speaking women. Mistresses can be kept safely and conveniently, while wives can be let loose on the boutiques of Sloane Street and Mayfair.

Local friends are few and far between. Russians in particular tend to prefer old friends to new ones, even among compatriots. British forms of socialising, such as the dinner party, strike them as offputtingly-formal. The language barrier- many of the Londonchiki speak only limited English - presents a problem too.

Those Britons who do bridge the gap are cherished. Prince Michael of Kent, who speaks impeccable Russian, is a particularly welcome guest.

So too are a handful of British investment bankers who served in Moscow in the 1990s when many Russian super-rich made their fortunes.

long this will last is an open question. An increasingly xenophobic Kremlin looks with disdain at Russians-with a penchant for lavish lifestyles in exile.

And whether or not Patarkatsishvili was murdered, many super-rich (and not only from Russia) regard the prospect of dealing with the British tax authorities as on a par with assassination or extradition.

More pertinently, if the death proves to be the work of political assassins, it will be the second such death on British shores following the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.

Even in their luxurious British fortresses, it seems, there is no guarantee of safety for the oligarchs in exile. It might be time to move on to an even more secretive playground.

In the boutiques of Geneva, the staff would do well to be studying their Russian dictionaries.

• Edward Lucas is author of The New Cold War, Bloomsbury, £18.99

NewInterviews

Economist Radio has an interview with Timothy Garton Ash, aka "Mr Europe" and also with Ilmars Rimsevics, governor of the Bank of Latvia

And you can watch my interview on Newsnight, the BBC TV evening current affairs show here

Review from New York Sun

February 7, 2008 Edition > Section: Opinion > Printer-Friendly Version

Putin's New Cold War

BY DANIEL JOHNSON
February 7, 2008
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/70910

LONDON — So you thought the Cold War was over, did you? Welcome to Vladimir Putin's new Russian Empire.

Using the wealth generated by soaring oil and gas prices, the Kremlin has intimidated its former satellites in Eastern Europe, while treating most of America's North American Treaty Organization allies as if they too could be pushed around.

Russian revanchism for the supposed humiliations of the Yeltsin era in the 1990s drives this agenda. President Putin calls the collapse of the Soviet Union the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the twentieth century, and the suggestion is that everything that has happened since 1991, or even 1989, should now be reversed.

The Russian bear is now throwing his weight about in the international arena, inciting riots in neighboring states or cutting off energy supplies where the Kremlin feels its interests and prestige are at stake.

Whether this campaign of bullying is comparable to the Cold War is a matter of huge importance to the West. Hence it matters which experts we pay attention to.

One whom I can unreservedly recommend is Edward Lucas, an authority on the subject who has been covering the region since the 1980s and has for many years been the Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for the Economist. Mr. Lucas has just published "The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Both Russia and the West" (Bloomsbury).

Mr. Lucas pulls no punches in excoriating the Putin regime. He is a brave man to stick his neck out so far. In Russia, journalists have been murdered for saying less than he claims in his book.

But "The New Cold War" is extremely — indeed, overwhelmingly — persuasive about the fate that has yet again befallen the unfortunate region of Europe that lies on the borderlands of East and West. For Mr. Putin's Russia, "repression at home is matched by aggression abroad." Whether it is targeting missiles at NATO countries or actually firing them at Georgia, Moscow has no compunction about using brute force to achieve its aims.

The most worrying factor in the situation is not, however, the attitudes of the most part fiercely independent states in the Baltic, Caucasus, or Central Europe. It is the tendency of the wealthy countries at one remove from Russian power, but dependent on Russian energy supplies, that really gives cause for concern.

Knowing how to play what Mr. Lucas calls "pipeline politics" is really the only contribution that Mr. Putin has made to Russian foreign policy during his eight years in office. But it has yielded political as well as economic dividends, despite the notorious inefficiency of Russia's state-run energy monopoly, Gazprom, whose chief executive, Dmitri Medvedev, is Mr. Putin's anointed successor.

During the period after September 11, when America was preoccupied with the Islamofascist threat to the virtual exclusion of others, West European leaders mostly cozied up to Mr. Putin: notably Jacques Chirac of France, Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy. Mr. Schröder even stooped so low as to accept a job from Gazprom immediately after leaving office.

During the past year or two, there has been a change of leadership and a notable hardening of tone: Chancellor Merkel of Germany and President Sarkozy of France have both talked tough to the Russians. But the energy dependency of Europe has increased if anything, while Russia's successful attempts to diversify its customer base in the far east has strengthened its bargaining in position.

Russia may call the shots in its acrimonious relationship with NATO, but the real economic power still lies with the West. "The free market cannot be decoupled from the free society," Mr. Lucas states. As long as Europe and America do not abandon the small, weak states in Russia's sphere of influence, they can prevent the new Cold War from spiralling out of control.

The Cold War was all about beating the Soviet Union at its own game, while keeping a clear sense of the ideological and moral gulf that separated the two systems. The Lucas thesis is in essence a plea for "a renewal of both that moral competition and moral distance."

In the War on Terror, the West's greatest enemy is itself, as in the Cold War. "Until we make it clear that we believe in our own values," Mr. Lucas argues, "we cannot defend ourselves against the subversion and corruption that are leaking into our citadels of economic and political power."

That's the point: we must believe in our own values. If we who have lived by this Judaeo-Christian moral code — including freedom, democracy, and the rule of law — do not proclaim it and fight to preserve it, why should the Russians, who have lived under one form of despotism or another since time immemorial, suddenly adopt it as their own?

Whether it is defending itself against Islamofascism or Putinism, the Atlantic alliance must believe in its own mission before it can win the war of ideas.

February 7, 2008 Edition > Section: Opinion > Printer-Friendly Version

Guardian piece plugging book

Putin's playground

Russia's leader and his cronies have crippled every constraint on their ugly brand of capitalism

• Edward Lucas
• The Guardian,
• Monday February 11 2008

Capitalism is amoral, verging on the immoral. What makes it tolerable is constraint and redress. Voters, consumers, shareholders, public officials, lawyers, legislators, journalists and pressure groups are counterweights to the ruthless and narrow pursuit of private profit. That doesn't work perfectly in the west, but it doesn't work at all in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where the fusion of political and economic power is complete.

The ex-spooks and their business cronies have launched a unique experiment in state capitalism, where the same people run both ministries and the industries they regulate, where markets are opened and closed according to the political clout of the participants, and where the rule of law and rights of the individual mean nothing.

The rough political pluralism of the 1990s had flaws, but it has given way to something far worse. Putin and his colleagues have crippled every constraint and removed every means of redress for the wronged. Opposition parties are marginalised; elections are like televised wrestling, a sham contest between carefully vetted contestants. The victory of Dmitry Medvedev in the presidential election on March 2 is as inevitable as it is puzzling. Nobody doubts he will win; nobody knows what he will be like in power or how long he will stay there.

The Duma has become a mere sounding board for the authorities. Every organ of state is harnessed to do the Kremlin's bidding. The judiciary, police and other supposedly independent bodies have become part of what Lenin referred to as the "transmission belt". But instead of communist ideology, the Kremlin now promotes "sovereign democracy" - a ragtag mixture of xenophobia, nationalism, mysticism and self-righteousness, buttressed with the sort of rhetoric that points to "a new phase in the arms race", as Putin said on Friday.

Civil society has been neutered. Any body receiving western funding attracts official displeasure. The bland culture-mongers of the British Council, hauled from their beds in the middle of the night to answer for the "crime" of working for foreigners, are just the most prominent casualties of the squeeze.

In 1990s Russia, under Boris Yeltsin, the crude pluralism of the media meant nobody was above criticism. Now draconian law and forced changes of ownership mean every national television channel, most newspapers and all but one radio station toe the official line.

The harshest treatment is reserved for individuals. Some, like Anna Politkovskaya, are killed. More often, the story is of intimidation, of conscription into the army for young men such as Oleg Kozlovsky, leader of an anti-Putin youth group, or incarceration in psychiatric hospitals, as has happened to Roman Nikolaichik, an opposition activist.

Nor does Russia come under any external constraint. It flouts the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. With foreign debts paid off and the Kremlin kitty stuffed, foreign donors and creditors have no leverage. Indeed, now Russia's firms romp through the capital markets in London and New York aided by lawyers and bankers who, when it comes to selling a stolen oil company, see not a jail cell but a bonus.

Old cold war hawks have long been bristling about Russia's soaring defence budget and bullying of western darlings like Estonia and Georgia. But criticism from the left has been oddly muted, partly thanks to Putin's self-depiction asa counterweight to a US "unipolar world" exemplified by Dick Cheney and oil-driven military adventures. Yet their days are numbered: US democracy is wriggling out of the Bush administration's grip. A far uglier face of capitalism lies to the east, not the west.

· Edward Lucas is the author of The New Cold War: How the Kremlin Menaces Russia and the West

new reviews

I will be talking and signing books at Politics and Prose in Washington DC on Sunday 17th Feb at 5pm.

Here is Marcus Warren's review in the Sunday Telegraph


And here is Tom de Waal's in the Sunday Times

I will be on the BBC Newsnight programme on Tuesday 2230 plugging the book and on BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves on Thursday

Piece for Fakt

Publicysta „The Economist” dla "Faktu"

piątek 8 lutego 2008 03:19

Lucas: Nie dajcie się oszukać Moskwie

» Lucas: Nie dajcie się oszukać Moskwie Zamknij X

zobacz galerię

Spadkobiercy tajnej stalinowskiej policji rządzą dziś Rosją. Z ich prawdziwą naturą mieliśmy do czynienia w ubiegłym miesiącu, kiedy to pracownicy British Council byli wyciągani z łóżek w związku z "przestępstwem", jakim było zatrudnienie u zagranicznego pracodawcy. Jednak jeszcze wyraźniejszym sygnałem – przynajmniej w oczach Polaków – jest powrót do fałszowania historii - pisze w "Fakcie" Edward Lucas, publicysta tygodnika "The Economist".

Zapoczątkowała to w ubiegłym roku państwowa „Rossijskaja Gazieta”, powtórzyła masowa „Komsomolskaja Prawda”, a potem telewizja Centr faktycznie kontrolowana przez burmistrza Moskwy. Teraz w weekendowym dodatku powtórzyła to „Niezawisimaja Gazieta”, niegdyś ekskluzywny dziennik wielkoformatowy. Władimir Putin tego nie firmował. Jednak posunął się już niebezpiecznie daleko w innych próbach pisania historii na nowo. Twierdził, że pakt Ribbentrop-Mołotow był legalny. Nie widzi potrzeby przeproszenia ofiar stalinizmu w krajach bałtyckich, ani gdziekolwiek indziej. Rosyjskie media idą dalej. Oczywiście rosyjska prasa - przynajmniej w teorii - może pisać to, co jej się podoba. Trudno jednak wyobrazić sobie brak reakcji ze strony rządu Niemiec, gdyby niemieckie media utrzymywały, że Holocaust wymyślili Żydzi, lub że to Polska zaatakowała Niemcy w 1939 roku. Jeszcze dziwniejsze jest to, że ten wybuch antypolskiej rewizjonistycznej historii nie jest odpowiedzią na jakąś prowokację, lecz ma miejsce w sytuacji, gdy rząd w Warszawie wychodzi z siebie, aby załagodzić stosunki z Moskwą.

Nowy minister spraw zagranicznych Radek Sikorski, zadając kłam swojej reputacji bezkompromisowego bojownika zimnej wojny, odbył przyjacielskie spotkania ze swoim rosyjskim odpowiednikiem Siergiejem Ławrowem. W perspektywie był interes: Rosja zniesie pozostałe sankcje nałożone na import z Polski, a Polska w zamian przestanie się sprzeciwiać nowemu porozumieniu pomiędzy Unią Europejską i Rosją. Polska już odstąpiła od blokowania możliwości podjęcia przez Rosję negocjacji w sprawie przystąpienia do OECD. Nie należy z tego wysnuwać prostego wniosku, że nowy polski rząd jest „miękki wobec Rosji”. To nowe stanowisko wiąże się z wyraźną, nieoficjalną zachętą zarówno ze strony Ameryki, jak i Niemiec, które były zdania, że uprawiana przez poprzedni rząd szorstka polityka wobec Rosji stworzyła mnóstwo niepotrzebnych problemów. Dzięki miłej (a przynajmniej uprzejmej) postawie Polski wobec Kremla, Niemcy na powrót zaczną ją traktować jak poważnego partnera.

Jednak zarówno pora, jak i perspektywy sukcesu stoją pod znakiem zapytania. Mimo podejmowanych co jakiś czas kosmetycznych prób wymalowania uśmiechu na kremlowskich kopułach, Rosja sunie w złym kierunku. Ksenofobia, nacjonalizm, nostalgia za ZSRR i pogarda dla europejskich swobód politycznych nie tylko sączą się tak po prostu z kontrolowanych przez państwo środków masowego przekazu; one stopniowo wsiąkają w narodową rosyjską psychikę.

Podpisanie przez Rosję i Bułgarię nowego porozumienia w sprawie budowy rurociągu naftowego jedynie uwypukla słabość i brak jedności Europy w obliczu bezwzględnego monopolu energetycznego Rosji. A ostatnie pogróżki, że Rosja użyje sił jądrowych w przypadku jakiegokolwiek ataku, podobnie jak kolosalny wzrost nakładów na obronę w rosyjskim budżecie, to kolejne echo dawnej zimnej wojny.

Wydaje się, że informacja o tym, iż Polska i Stany Zjednoczone są bliskie zawarcia porozumienia w sprawie obrony antyrakietowej wykoleiła tę ofensywę umizgów do Wschodu. Pan Sikorski może przynajmniej powiedzieć, że się starał. Sedno tkwi jednak w tym, że przyjazna postawa wobec Rosji nie przynosi korzyści, lecz stwarza ryzyko. Kreml nie lubi, kiedy jego sąsiedzi sami stanowią o swoim bezpieczeństwie. Ma to przerażające konsekwencje dla wszystkich byłych krajów podbitych - oraz zachodnich sojuszy, do których należą. Wojskowi stratedzy z NATO już opracowują scenariusze na wypadek, gdyby sojusz musiał udzielić krajom bałtyckim pomocy w przypadku jakiejś rosyjskiej blokady - współczesną wersję berlińskiego mostu powietrznego. Kiedy wreszcie my, Europejczycy, przestaniemy trzeć zaspane oczy i zauważymy to monstrualne zagrożenie, które się czai u naszych drzwi?

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Audio uploads

This week is Latvia--CEE's most exposed economy as global financial markets tighten and growth slows. Two pieces--one is an interview with Ilmars Rimsevics, governor of the bank of Latvia. The other is a discussion on Latvia's future with Alf Vanags, a Riga-based economist and Willem Buiter, formerly of the EBRD

Katyn

Europe.view

In denial

Feb 7th 2008
From Economist.com

Russia revives a vicious lie

Get article background

IMAGINE Nazi rule in Germany surviving for decades, with Hitler undefeated in war and succeeded on his death in the early 1950s by a series of lacklustre party hacks who more or less disowned his “excesses”. Imagine then a “reform Nazi” (call him Michael Gorbach) coming to power in the 1980s and dismantling the National Socialist system, only to fall from power as the Third Reich collapsed in political and economic chaos.

Imagine a shrunken “German Federation” suffering ten years of upheaval, before an SS officer (call him Voldemar Puschnik) came to power, first as prime minister and then as president. Under eight years of rule by Herr Puschnik, Germany regains economic stability, largely thanks to a sky-high coal price.

AP

The Soviets did it

That would be distasteful to put it mildly. But it might be tolerable. The SS, for all its faults, attracted bright, ambitious people, and Mr Puschnik’s career in its external espionage division meant that he was not directly tainted by the crimes of the past. Better a stable Germany than a chaotic one. Any big country is going to have its own security interests, and the Dutch, Czechs, Danes and Poles would safeguard their regained independence best by trying to get along with Mr Puschnik, rather than harping on about the evils of Nazism.

It’s much the same in Russia. It would be quite wrong to blame modern Russians for Stalin-era crimes. Russia is not going to go away, and Poles, Balts and others should try not to provoke the Kremlin unnecessarily. The KGB had a dreadful history, but Mr Putin’s role was seemingly anodyne.

But that calculus holds only if modern day rulers show no hint of sympathy for their predecessors’ atrocities. If Herr Puschnik, our putative leader of a post-Nazi Germany, starts flirting with Holocaust denial, every alarm should ring.

Vladimir Putin has already come dangerously close to this in Russia. He has claimed that the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was legal. He sees no need to apologise to Baltic victims of Stalinism.

But the Russian media is going further. In the past six months no fewer than four different outlets have revived the outrageous falsehood that it was the Nazis, not the Soviets, who murdered 20,000 captured Polish officers at Katyn in 1940. That Stalin-era lie, enforced at gun-point in post-war Poland, viciously aggravated the original crime. It was buried in 1990, with solemn Kremlin support.

The falsehoods are not in fringe publications. It started with Rossiiskaya Gazeta, a state-owned newspaper, on September 18th last year. It was repeated by the mass-market Komsomolskaya Pravda on October 22nd and again by TV Tsentr—a station in effect run by the Moscow Mayor’s office—on November 4th. Now it has been repeated again by what used to be an upmarket broadsheet, Nezavisimaya Gazeta, in its weekend supplement on military affairs.

This comes not in response to some Polish provocation, but at a time when the government in Warsaw has been bending over backwards to soothe relations with Moscow.

The Russian media—in theory at least—can print what it likes. But it is hard not to conclude that this outbreak of revisionist history comes with at least tacit official blessing.

The best way to dispel this would be for the Kremlin and the Russian foreign ministry to come out with a clear and forceful statement saying that from the official side at least, no doubt whatsoever exists that the Soviet secret police, acting on Stalin’s orders, carried out the Katyn massacre. Failure to do that suggests at best atrocious cynicism and at worst a nauseating sympathy with the perpetrators.

Launch piece from The Times

From The Times

February 5, 2008

Why kowtow to brutal, cynical Russia?

We have a new Cold War and we're losing it. The West must stand up to the Kremlin now

Edward Lucas

Sixty years ago the Berlin Airlift highlighted the menace of Stalin's Kremlin. Forty years ago Soviet tanks crushed both the Prague Spring and any remaining illusions about the Kremlin's grip on the captive nations. Twenty years ago we began dropping our guard, as totalitarianism withered under Mikhail Gorbachev. Now it is time to acknowledge the inconvenient truth. Russia is back: rich, powerful and hostile. Partnership is giving way to rivalry, with increasingly threatening overtones. The new Cold War has begun - but just as in the 1940s, we are alarmingly slow to notice it.

The loudest alarm signal is Russia's predictable yet mystifying presidential election on March 2. Predictable because everyone knows who will win: Dmitri Medvedev, Vladimir Putin's polite, lawyerly sidekick; mystifying because the meaning of that victory is so unclear. Will Mr Medvedev be a mere figurehead? Will he stand down and allow Mr Putin to return? What does his stint running Russia's energy giant, Gazprom, one of the world's most corrupt, incompetent and sinister companies, tell us about his plans for the future? What does his rise mean for the clans of crooks and spooks whose murky feuds have increased so sharply in past months? Once a dead art, Kremlinology is now a lively and useful discipline.

Politics in Russia is a matter of life and death. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia's richest man, is on prison hunger strike in protest against the ill-treatment of his aide Vasily Aleksanyan. Mr Aleksanyan is confined in a filthy mould-infested cell because he refuses to sign a bogus confession incriminating Mr Khodorkovsky. His judicial torture, including denial of medical care, which has blinded him, has been condemned by the European Court of Human Rights. It reads like something from Dostoyevsky, not a factual account of prison conditions in supposedly one of the world's top eight industrialised democracies.

That doesn't bother most Russians. Mr Putin is wildly popular; so is Mr Medvedev. Mr Khodorkovsky and other former “oligarchs” are seen as despicable emblems of the 1990s, a decade in which Russians feel they were swindled at home and humiliated abroad. Mr Putin has brought both stability and pride. For now, democracy has failed: most Russians say they agree that the media should be controlled and that the opposition should not be allowed to contend for power.

Those feelings are complex. They are partly the result of the state-controlled media's propaganda. They also truly represent tragic misunderstandings and missed opportunities in the Yeltsin years, when oil prices were low and Russian governments struggled with crippling foreign debts. Mr Putin has been lucky - with oil at nearly $100 a barrel, Russia is bound to prosper. Yet he too is a product of the 1990s, an unemployed ex-spy who became a top official in the Yeltsin Kremlin. His denunciations of that era neglect to mention its strengths: press freedom, and also economic reforms such as privatisation and price liberalisation from which Russia has hugely benefited.

Communism has gone, but in its place has come “sovereign democracy”, a potent cocktail of self-righteousness, nationalism and xenophobia that fuels the Kremlin's power grab abroad. In the “swing states” of Eastern Europe - Bulgaria, Latvia and Moldova - we are already losing the new Cold War. We have avoided catastrophe in Serbia by a hair's breadth. The great engines of EU and Nato expansion, which brought half a continent into our orbit after the collapse of communism, have stalled.

But it is not just “faraway countries of which we know nothing” that are at stake. Russia plays divide and rule with the West, ruthlessly using our democratic politics and open economies to undermine us. It has brazenly hired Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, to promote its biggest energy project, Nord Stream. This is a hugely expensive and strategically vital gas pipeline on the Baltic seabed that will bypass Poland and deliver gas straight to Germany. Like a rich and powerful man who becomes pathetically dependent on heroin, Germany is mainlining on Russian energy. The new pipeline hooks up addict and pusher directly. Instead of urgently diversifying away from gas and to other suppliers, the Netherlands, Italy and Austria are following the same path.

Russia has cowed and muzzled the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, supposedly the Continent's main democracy-promoting and election-monitoring body. It has nobbled the Council of Europe, a talking shop that is supposed to be the custodian of human rights. The British Conservatives, in bizarre alliance with Mr Putin's United Russia party, came within a whisker of electing a former KGB man and Kremlin propagandist, Mikhail Margelov, to the presidency. At its summit in Bucharest in April, Nato's European members are all set to kowtow to Kremlin pressure and give a cold shoulder to Georgia's bid to move towards membership. The EU can not even summon the willpower to liberalise its internal energy markets, let alone counter the Kremlin's ruthless use of cheap energy deals and lucrative pipelines.

Our biggest weakness is money. During the old Cold War, doing business with the Soviet Union was a rare and highly suspicious activity. Now bankers, lawyers, consultants and spin-doctors (and even, it is whispered, politicians) flock to take 30 silver roubles for services rendered, even when they are privately disgusted by the source. Until that changes, we have little chance of resisting the Kremlin - and even less of persuading ordinary Russians that their corrupt, cynical, brutal and incompetent rulers are harbingers of disaster, not triumph.

Edward Lucas is author of The New Cold War: how the Kremlin menaces both Russia and the West

More Katyn denial

Just spotted this update from Poland's Gazeta newspaper. It lists no fewer than four occasions in past months in which Russian media have tried to rewrite the history of the Katyn massacre.

The first is from Rossiiskaya gazeta on 18th September 2007 and is already posted on this site (it never appeared on the rg.ru site as far as I can see).

Then came Komsomolskaya pravda on 22nd October which claimed that the Nazis did it and forced the Russians to blame the NKVD.

Then TV Tsentr (the Luzhkov station) reported on November 4th that the Stalin-era archival documents about the massacre were not authentic.

And now Nezavisimaya gazeta has, in its weekend supplement Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye claimed that the whole thing is impossible because the officers were shot with German bullets.

Anyone who could track down the URL the broadcast would be doing the cause of truth a favour.
Many thanks to those people who posted the links to the KP and NWO articles

New Audio Uploads

The Economist is continuing its advance into audio. You can hear an interview with Toomas Hendrick Ilves on democracy and also a discussion with Ivan Krastev and Sean Hanley.

After a bit of a delay, here is an excellent interview with James Sherr, whose analysis of relations with Russia featured in Europe.view a few weeks back.

Katyn lies

Here is a copy of the disgraceful Rossiiskaya Gazeta commentary on Katyn

Something for the weekend, sir?

Sexual fantasies

Secret cinema

Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies By Brett Kahr Basic Books; 304 pages; $28. Published in Britain as “Sex and the Psyche: The Truth About Our Most Secret Sexual Fantasies”; Allen Lane; £12.99 Buy it at Amazon.com Amazon.co.uk

ASKING strangers to recount their most private thoughts about sex is unlikely to make a dull book, and Brett Kahr's compendious research into the psychology of sexual fantasy is gripping. It is also somewhat alarming.

Leave it open on your desk at work, and prudish colleagues or bosses may think your reading matter highly unsuitable. If you have children, it is not the sort of thing (unless you are very modern-minded) that you would leave around at home. In particular, the middle section is unsparingly explicit about every possible sort of erotic daydream. It includes sentences such as “let us immerse ourselves in some representative incest fantasies”. (Let's not, some readers may feel.)

Not that it is all so hair-raising. Some people, not unexpectedly perhaps, fantasise about celebrities. A handful imagine romantic tenderness with their real-life partners. But many of those surveyed say they like thinking about doing disgusting things with, to, or in front of, total strangers, or (perhaps more unsettlingly) the people they love.

The case studies are not dirty stories, however. They are part of a big, solemnly academic, five-year research project. Mr Kahr, a London-based academic and therapist, surveyed (anonymously) 18,000 people in Britain and America in conjunction with YouGov, an internet pollster, and conducted 132 five-hour interviews. The upshot is that nine out of ten people have sexual fantasies, mostly pretty lurid ones—and Mr Kahr thinks the remaining tenth are crippled by shame, guilt or repression.

Any sense of prurience is relieved by Mr Kahr's prose, which is sympathetic, witty and erudite. He quotes Latin tags and Italian opera confidently, and wears his psychoanalytical learning fairly lightly. Blessed with what he calls “a strong psychological digestive tract”, he is not the sort of person to run shrieking from the room in horror, or to phone the police, when he finds out that someone confesses to relaxing by thinking about extreme sexual violence towards unsuspecting strangers. Instead, he tries to work out why so many people find sexual fantasy so important.

A lay person might count boredom and natural weirdness as the most likely fuel for fantasies. But Mr Kahr focuses on nasty experiences in the past. Fantasies are a way of rewriting childhood history, sometimes to wreak revenge on abusive or absent adults, sometimes to sanitise memories of them. A woman was attacked from behind as a small girl by her mother, who smashed her head into a glass table. As an adult, her fantasy is about having her breasts caressed by a faceless stranger who reaches over her head.

The guts of the book are to be found in the final chapter, where Mr Kahr answers the 21 questions he poses at the outset. These include the empirical, such as the definition, purpose and prevalence of sexual fantasy, and more ticklish dilemmas. Should one confess fantasies to a partner? (Probably not.) Are fantasies a sign of a relationship in trouble? (Not necessarily; they may be a safety valve.) And do we control our fantasies, or vice versa? (For most people, it's a bit of both.) Best think twice, though, before suggesting this for your book club.

Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?: The Secret World of Sexual Fantasies.
By Brett Kahr.
Basic Books; 304 pages; $28

Scientology

given the deep pockets and litigious nature of some people in the world, I will do no more than draw readers' attention to an interesting article in this week's Economist

Whataboutism

Europe.view

Whataboutism
Jan 31st 2008
From Economist.com


Come again, Comrade?

SOVIET propagandists during the cold war were trained in a tactic that their western interlocutors nicknamed “whataboutism”. Any criticism of the Soviet Union (Afghanistan, martial law in Poland, imprisonment of dissidents, censorship) was met with a “What about...” (apartheid South Africa, jailed trade-unionists, the Contras in Nicaragua, and so forth).

It is not a bad tactic. Every criticism needs to be put in a historical and geographical context. A country that has solved most of its horrible problems deserves praise, not to be lambasted for those that remain. Similarly, behaviour that may be imperfect by international standards can be quite good for a particular neighbourhood.


But it can be overdone—and in the case of Soviet propagandists, it was, and gave rise to subversive jokes For example: A caller to a radio program asks, “What is the average wage of an American manual worker?” A long pause ensues. Then the answer comes: “U nich negrov linchuyut” (“Over there they lynch Negroes”)—a phrase that, by the time of the Soviet collapse, had become a synecdoche for Soviet propaganda as a whole.

Whataboutism seemed to have died a natural death at the end of the cold war. But now it seems to be making a comeback. Your columnist took part in a live television conversation with some Russian colleagues last week, supposedly to discuss the bad image of Russia in the British press. It would be possible to make some quite reasonable points from the Russian side: is the media reaction to the Kremlin’s treatment of the British Council selective or disproportionate? Are there angles to this story that nobody is exploring that might put Britain’s stance in a different light?

Instead, the viewers were treated to a lively display of whataboutism. How could the West criticise Russia for sabre-rattling, asked the eloquent Aleksei Pushkov, when America and its allies had not just rattled sabres, but actually used them in Iraq. And so on and so forth.

It would help if Russia had a word for whataboutism. Literally, it could be kaknaschyotism. A crisp remark about lynching also raises a laugh and makes the point.

But the bigger problem is finding a way to discuss Russia’s problems in a way that does not immediately lead to a sterile argument reminiscent of the ponderous tirades of the 1980s.

One solution is to use points made by Russian leaders themselves. Guess who said this: “Russia is a country of legal nihilism at the level...that no European country can boast of…Corruption in the official structures has a huge scale”. That sounds as though it came from some opposition politician such as Garry Kasparov—the sort of marginal (or marginalised) figure that Russians often say gains far too much western attention. But the speaker was Dmitri Medvedev (pictured above), successor-designate to Vladimir Putin.

Another is for outsiders to show a bit more self-criticism. It is worth noting early on in the discussion some outrageous flaws in American (or British, or German, or French) foreign policy, as well as recent scandals involving corruption and abuse of power.

The most powerful western asset during the last cold war was not bigger nukes or higher living standards, but self-criticism. However bad western governments may be, they risk trouble eventually—from the media, the courts or the voters. That is not something that one can say with much confidence about Russia now.

Telex lives on

Telex

A faint ping

Jan 31st 2008
From The Economist print edition

An ancestor of e-mail lives on

LIKE slide-rules, steam engines and carbon paper, the telex machine, once ubiquitous and indispensable, has vanished from sight. But not, quite, from existence. As younger readers may need reminding, or informing, the telex was what would nowadays be called a hard-wired, low-bandwidth, point-to-point messaging system.

At speeds of around one-millionth of that of a modern broadband connection, it sent data chugging along dedicated networks to clunky terminals.

In its time, telex was a huge improvement on the international telegram system, which could charge the modern equivalent of several dollars per word. It was often better than making international phone calls, which were cumbersome, crackly and costly. It was on telex systems that today's electronic data interchange developed. Telex starred in the huge logistics effort for the airlift that supplied West Berlin during the Soviet blockade of 1948.

It would be easy to imagine that newer technology puts paid to such systems. But their death throes are oddly slow. Three countries, Japan, Kuwait and Italy, still maintain the old-fashioned international telegrams. And the internet has not yet killed off the telex. It has certainly sent traffic tumbling (see chart). In March Britain's BT will be the latest big company to cease offering telex services. “All good things come to an end,” says a spokesman. Britain will then join around 30 countries including Austria, Germany and Russia that no longer provide telex through their national telecoms operators.

But that clears the way for nimble, low-cost competitors. These have turned round the technology. As well as maintaining the old-fashioned service involving terminals and dedicated lines, they provide telex services both over phone lines and over the internet—in effect, making it a secure and ultra-reliable variant of e-mail. One, SwissTelex, is a spin-off from the Swiss national telecoms operator that offers international telex services and has taken over BT's network. Another is EasyLink, based in America, which provides a service for Dutch, Belgian and Japanese subscribers.

Many of the remaining customers are banks. Telexes, unlike ordinary e-mails, are legally valid documents (being to all intents and purposes impossible to fake). “The telex network is closed—you can't get in unless you are part of the club,” says Peter MacLaverty of SwissTelex.

Small financial institutions not hooked up to the main international money-transfer system, SWIFT, find telexes a cost-effective alternative. And with no server to go down, the telex system is robust. Big banks like that: for them back-up systems are vital, and the cost of keeping a telex is trivial.

Euroclear, the world's largest settlement system for international financial markets, maintains 184 telex accounts for 50 out of its 1,375 clients. It sends up to 800 telexes a day, mostly as confirmation for transactions. The system is overseen by Danny Bogaerts, a communications manager who was told when he joined the company in 1975 not to learn about telexes because they were soon going to be obsolete. “You can laugh about it,” he admits. “It is old-fashioned—but it works.” The second big customer group is at sea. Ocean-going ships are still legally required to have a telex on board—chiefly for SOS messages.

Even its fans do not pretend that telex is a technology with a bright future. Euroclear, for example, will start decommissioning its telex system in 2010 when it introduces new software. “I'm surprised it has lasted as long as it has,” says Mr MacLaverty. “What we aim to do is to be the last man standing,” says Eva Allen of EasyLink. “Who will send the last telex? Possibly me.”

Trumping denial

New film: “Katyn”

Unburied dead

Jan 24th 2008
From The Economist print edition

Poland's historical epic in the limelight

A CRIME and a lie are the twin strands in the shameful tragedy of Katyn: the massacre of 20,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police, and the cover-up that followed. Now Andrzej Wajda, Poland's leading film maker, has made his last film (he is 81) about what he calls the “unhealed wound” in his country's history.

Mr Wajda's own father, Jakub, was murdered at Katyn, as were family members of many of the production team. Those killings come in a gruelling, 15-minute final sequence. First, the film shows in sombre and claustrophobic detail the Polish POWs' travels to Golgotha; the occupation authorities' vengeance on their families, and flashes forward to the attempts by the country's post-war rulers to disguise and deface the historical record.

The film has been nominated for best foreign-language film at this year's Oscars. Those watching it should not expect to come away happily humming the dramatic theme music by Krzysztof Penderecki. “Katyn” is based on the letters and diaries of real-life victims—unearthed when the Nazis first came across the mass graves in 1943. The last entry records the Polish officers' arrival at the killing fields. “A thorough search. They didn't find my wedding ring. They took my belt, my penknife and my watch. It showed 0630 Polish time. What will happen to us?”

Expert cinematography, compelling acting, and a story that leaves the viewer both sorrowful and angry, are a strong combination. But they may not be quite enough to convince the judges. “Katyn” is filmed from an uncompromisingly Polish point of view. Some outsiders may find it confusing. One of the most powerful scenes, for example, is the mass arrest of the professors of Cracow University by the Germans. Those who already know about the upheaval that followed the German invasion of 1939 will see the point: the Soviets and the Nazis were accomplices. Others may puzzle.

The moral dilemmas of post-war Polish collaborators are better portrayed than those of the wartime occupiers. If honouring the dead means doom for your family—or for you—is it better to keep silent? Poles faced that choice again and again after 1945, as their new rulers used Katyn as a litmus test of loyalty. But barring one Red Army officer, impeccably played by a Ukrainian actor, Sergei Garmash, who saves his neighbours (an officer's widow and child) from deportation, the foreigners are so villainous as to be little more than sinister mannequins.

Melodrama is perhaps one fault of the film; an oddly sanitised picture of daily life is another. Teeth, complexions and clothes all evoke the prosperous Poland of today more than the squalor and hunger of 1945. Material deprivation brings out the worst and the best in people. But it needs to be shown to make the measure convincing.

Astonishingly, some in Russia are now reviving the lie that the murderers at Katyn were not by the NKVD, but the Nazis. That was maintained during the communist era, but only by punishing savagely those who tried to tell the truth. Last year, as Mr Wajda's film opened in Poland, a commentary in a Russian government newspaper, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, dismissed the evidence of Soviet involvement in Katyn as “unreliable”. An Oscar would be a good answer to that.

A gloomy upshot

Eastern Europe, America and Russia
Pipedreams
Jan 24th 2008
| VILNIUS
From The Economist print edition

America seems to care more than the European Union about eastern Europe
EUROPEANS may not always like it, but America still matters most for their security. As Kosovo edges towards independence, NATO ponders further expansion and Russia rips Europe's threadbare energy policy to rags, every debate involves America. And the mood is gloomy.
“Russia is getting stronger; we are getting weaker”, concludes one European political leader. That is alarmingly clear in Serbia, where a pro-Russian nationalist, Tomislav Nikolic, came out ahead in the first round of the presidential election on January 20th. Serbia has just signed an energy pact to distribute Russian gas exports to Europe; in return a Russian company (the oil arm of Gazprom, the state-run gas giant) is to get a controlling share in Serbia's national oil monopoly.

Europeans flinch at the idea of Kosovo, the mostly ethnic-Albanian province of Serbia, declaring independence immediately—something the Russians strongly oppose. The Americans fear that more delay risks violence by impatient Kosovars or by Serb provocateurs. Some Europeans plead for a few weeks longer, perhaps to allow yet more talks with Serbia after its presidential election, or simply to get more European waverers such as Spain and Romania to back European Union recognition of an independent Kosovo.
Serbia is one of what some analysts call “swing states”, places where Russia and the West are vying for influence. Others include Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Moldova—and even a few EU members such as Latvia and Bulgaria. President Vladimir Putin of Russia, accompanied by his likely successor, Dmitry Medvedev, recently signed a deal with Bulgaria to build a new pipeline across the Black Sea. Called South Stream, this will pipe Russian gas direct to Europe, bypassing transit countries such as Ukraine and Poland. In this, it matches Nord Stream, a similar bypass under the Baltic (see map--on economist.com).

South Stream may stymie a rival EU effort, Nabucco, which was meant to bring gas from the Caspian and Central Asia to western Europe through the Balkans. Nabucco would be the only pipeline from the region not to cross Russian territory, giving Europe the hope of more diversified gas supplies. Nabucco's prospects already looked shaky: gas for it must come from either a trans-Caspian pipeline (which Russia has blocked) or Iran (which America dislikes). If South Stream were built, it would make Nabucco uneconomic.
Pipelines and dependence on Russian gas are not the only sources of controversy. American and European diplomats are also wrestling with the question of NATO expansion, which may feature at the alliance's summit in Bucharest in April. The leading candidate is Croatia. Albania and Macedonia are less prepared, but bringing them in might be seen as one way of countering instability caused by Serbia's hostility to Kosovo's independence.
That leaves Ukraine, whose new government says it wants eventually to join NATO, and Georgia, which tarnished its democratic credentials in a crackdown on opposition protests in November. Offering either country a membership action plan—a staging post to joining the alliance—would enrage Russia. But holding back might be seen as giving the Kremlin a veto over its neighbours' security arrangements. The hunt is on for something else to offer instead.
Largely silent is the EU, whose members appear more concerned over institutional reform and emissions targets (see article) than geopolitical issues. That worries the Americans. They seem to have settled a row with Poland over a planned missile-defence base. But not much else is going right. Ron Asmus, a former American diplomat now at the German Marshall Fund, a think-tank, frets publicly about a “rollback” of the West's influence in eastern Europe. He is not the only one.

Europe.view column

Europe.view

All for none
Jan 24th 2008
From Economist.com


The perils of disparate interests


IT WOULD be nice to think that the harassment of the British Council by the Russian authorities would prompt a united, imaginative European response. Perhaps in a parallel universe it is. Imagine Germany’s Goethe Institute, the Spanish Instituto Cervantes, the Institut Français and other Western cultural-diplomacy offices announcing joint efforts to promote the English language and British culture and hire all the staff of the British Council offices.

That would force the Kremlin to decide whether it really wanted a full-scale confrontation with its most important neighbours. Such a stance would prove beyond doubt the need for a serious rethink. If Russia backed down, the row would end.

In this universe, though, the response has been feeble, and not for the first time. When European countries have tiffs with the Kremlin, they tend to find themselves standing alone, not shoulder to shoulder with their allies.

In Britain’s case, that is partly the fault of the prime minister, Gordon Brown, whose hermit-like approach to Europe has won him few friends. A man who won’t even come to the phone when the French and German leaders want to talk to him can hardly expect their instant help when things get tricky.

But it also reflects Russia’s remarkable ability to strike bilateral deals. Every European country has its own agenda—perhaps the prospect of cheap gas, perhaps the chance of a lucrative investment in Russia’s booming economy. Such considerations tend to override any other concerns.

The overall result is dismal. Russia tends to put countries in one of three categories: those it flatters, those it squeezes, and those it ignores. Countries can be switched with remarkable rapidity. Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Romania are, for now, in the “ignore” category. Estonia and Lithuania, as well as, most of all, Britain, are in the “squeeze” category. France, Germany, Italy. Bulgaria and Poland are, for now, in the “flatter” box. Latvia was there too—but this week’s news of the expulsion of a Russian embassy official, supposedly caught red-handed trying to bribe local public servants, may change things.

The result is a kind of diplomatic ratchet, which goes in one direction only. That suits the Kremlin fine—it doesn’t need to be friendly with all European countries, just enough to prevent any united European policy emerging.

And when relations are good, Russia makes real gains—such as the recent energy deal with Bulgaria. Vladimir Putin, accompanied by his successor-designate Dmitri Medvedev, visited there last week and signed a deal on the South Stream pipeline.

This puts the kibosh on European hopes of building Nabucco, which could—if everything else went right—bring gas from Azerbaijan and elsewhere to European markets, without crossing territory under Russian control. With Russian deals done or looming in most of the countries that Nabucco is supposed to cross, the project looks moribund.

Perhaps in the parallel universe things are different: European countries could react to the South Stream deal by telling Russia that unless it signs the energy charter and demonopolises its pipelines, Europe is both going ahead with Nabucco and building a bunch of terminals to import liquefied natural gas.

They could also synchronise their counter-intelligence work. Instead of dealing with Russian spies piece-meal, they could organise a joint expulsion: say four from each country, announced at the same time on the same day. That would send a sharp signal to the Kremlin spymasters that their efforts were attracting seriously unwelcome attention, not just bouts of irritation.

Europe collectively is much bigger, richer and stronger than Russia. You wouldn’t know it from reading the news—in this universe at least.