Monthly Archives: January 2008

One of the strange rituals of political campaigns is the wealth disclosure.  Not because I think that politicians shouldn’t declare their wealth when they run for office.  They should.  In full.  Even the offshores.  And their families too.  If there is a third cousin with a bank account, I, as a voter, wanna know.   Better to know how many different cookie jars his little puffy fingers are in before you stick him in charge of a state.  What makes it strange is that we know that politicians have access to all sorts of wealth and property yet we continue the charade.

Russia’s Central Electoral Commission released information on the income of Vladimir Zhirinovksy and Gennady Zyuganov. In the last four years, Zyuganov earned 3,445,291.61 rubles ($140,538.10).  According to Kommersant this includes his Duma rep salary, pension, and interest on deposits.  He has three bank accounts with a whopping 152,500 ..read more

Novoe Vremya journalist Natalia Morar reports on her blog that she has been “officially designated as a danger to the safety and security of Russia.” Readers will remember that the Moldovan born, permanent Russian resident was refused reentry into Russia in December. According to Kommersant, when she tried to enter Russia through Domodedovo airport, border officers informed her that “her presence in Russia was “undesirable” and they were acting on a directive of the “central apparatus of the FSB.”

It wouldn’t be surprising if this is true. Morar is known for articles detailing corruption within the Russian political elite. She has recently turned her pen to the current “Siloviki War.” In a recent article on that subject she detailed the various factions and infighting between members of Russia’s various security organs over the right to preserve Russia’s “order.” The “Siloviki War” is clearly about ..read more

Russia is not free. That’s the conclusion Freedom House has made in its new report “Freedom in the World 2008.” According to its scorecard, Russia received a “6″ in Political Rights and a “5″ in Civil Liberties. The scale puts “1″ as the most free and “7″ as “not free.” The main reason the report cites Russia’s continued unfree slide was the charges of vote rigging in Duma elections this fall. You wouldn’t know it from the scorecard. Compared to last year’s report, there has been no numerical change in Russia’s freedom, or should I say, lack thereof.

Granted, I don’t take these attempts to quantify such philosophically weighty concepts like “freedom” very seriously. There is just something comical about such studies. Is it the reports’ crass reductionism? Is it how assigning measurement to freedom seems to trivialize its meaning? Or is ..read more

It seems that I was led astray. Or I didn’t read the fine print. I was under the impression that the Moscow News had ceased publication. I found out about this from a story in the Toronto Star by Kelly Toughill which Robert Amsterdam posted on his blog. In her article “Free Press Under Siege in Russia,” Toughill wrote:

Moskovskiye Novosti (Moscow News) shut down this week. Novosti was the most influential newspaper in Russia as the Soviet Union was falling apart. People stood in line for hours to get a copy, amazed to see the truth on paper for the very first time. Its demise seems symbolic.

Symbolic in the sense that print newspapers around the world are feeling the economic crunch. In a press release in December, Daniel Kupsin, MN’s administrative head, said that “we don’t see any commercial value in [the paper's] continued ..read more

There is so much to say about Anders Aslund’s “Purge or Coup?” commentary in the Moscow Times. The big question on his mind is why Putin isn’t going to retire as promised. Aslund’s reasons are twofold: 1) There have been “serious accusations of corruption and grand larceny” raised against Putin requiring him to secure immunity via the office of the Prime Minister. 2) Putin is, in good old dialectical fashion, the identical subject-object of the system he’s created. If he leaves, Aslund asserts, “his system is prone to collapse.” Now, I completely dismiss the first and agree somewhat with the second. But my agreement with Aslund is for different reasons than he provides.

Putin doesn’t need immunity because there haven’t been any serious allegations of grand larceny. At least not enough for anyone in Russia to take seriously. Allegations of Putin’s wealth ..read more

Does Vladimir Putin have a soul? He doesn’t if you ask Hillary Clinton. In a campaign stump in New Hampshire, Clinton pondered the existence of Putin’s soul as a means to crack at George Bush’s foreign policy. She said:

“Bush really premised so much of our foreign policy on his personal relationships with leaders, and I just don’t think that’s the way a great country engages in diplomacy. . . . This is the president that looked in the soul of Putin, and I could have told him, he was a KGB agent. By definition he doesn’t have a soul. I mean, this is a waste of time, right? This is nonsense, but this is the world we’re living in right now.”

The comment drew laughs and applause from a Democratic crowd always eager to hear jabs at the Prez they love to hate. ..read more