Stephen Fidler at the Wall Street Journal has an interesting piece running today about the annual winter pipeline politics (though the sensible agreement yesterday in Yalta may diminish a lot of fears).  There are some interesting facts and numbers in the piece - for example the estimate that Gazprom's contract prices are sitting around $10 per million BTU, while LNG can be had on the spot market for $4 per million BTU.  In a refreshing change of pace, we see Fidler point more of the blame at the national champions E.ON and ENI if by chance Eastern European households go cold this winter.  From a business perspective, a supply cut-off would really hurt Gazprom and benefit the state-corporate avarice of Western Europe (who have the ability to import from alternative sources).Either way, things are looking bad for everybody ...

A while back we pointed to the Twitter feed of Russia's Amb. to NATO Dmitry Rogozin.  Today it looks like he has launched a personal assault on Radoslav Sikorski, the Polish MFA (everybody is just so prickly around this Berlin Wall anniversary).  I put Dima's tweets in chronological order to better understand his thought process:@Rogozin  Polish FM Sikorsky gave a very strange interview. Hu suggested demolishing the Stalin-style House of Science and Culture in centre of Warsaw about 6 hours ago from web ...

We could've guessed from the letter he signed earlier this year that the Czech luminary/dissident Vaclav Havel was not done talking about the authoritarian drift in Russia.  The Telegraph reports on his speech before a rally commemorating the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution:The 73-year-old who played a pivotal role in freeing his country from communist rule in 1989, said that the Russian government had mastered the art of manipulating its population while maintaining democratic façade."The era of dictatorships and totalitarian systems has not ended at all," he said."It may have ended in a traditional form as we know it from the 20th century, but new, far more sophisticated ways of controlling society are ...

You've got to respect Global Witness ... for a watchdog NGO, they bring a lot of creativity and innovation to their cause (see this past campaign for another example).  GW has also done a tremendous job in the past unearthing all the corruption surrounding RosUkrEnergo, a subject which has come up again and again (let's just say the corruption scandal reaches pretty high).  Today they published another hot report to remind the European Commission how they've got it all wrong in selling out human rights and democracy to the brutal dictatorship in Turkmenistan in exchange for eventual access to natural gas ... including a collaboration with the political cartoonist David Rees.Click here ...

The video clips below provide a handy summary of the reports expected on the economic, financial and corporate front around the globe during the week ahead.

US: Retail results, economy in focus Retailers including Home Depot and Target will report results and key economic data will include retail sales and industrial output. Meanwhile, nine speakers from the Federal Reserve will offer their views on the economy.

Europe: Air France-KLM report Airbus owner EADS reports quarterly results along with airline Air France-KLM. In the UK luxury-goods group Burberry will provide an update.

Asia: Obama tour, data in focus U.S. President Barack Obama will tour the region, making stops in Japan and China to start

...

Dmitri Trenin, Director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, dissects Russia's foreign policy in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs in an article entitled, "Russia Reborn." Following is the passage I think resonates the most. I'm going to keep my lead-in short here because the excerpt is long and not all of you are going to like it, so brace yourselves:

Although the Kremlin did succeed in proving its strategic independence from Europe and the United States, there can be no talk of Russia's overall equality with either of the two. This leaves Moscow with a paradox: it is unwilling to become a junior partner to Brussels and Washington, but they will not accept it as an equal. Likewise, as Medvedev has pointed out, Russia is excluded from any meaningful security structure in

...

Translated from a Russian stock market report in yesterday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:

Analysts from the investment bank Troika Dialog therefore consider the increasing strength of the American economy as a threat to above-average development of the Russian stock markets, which would lead to an increase in the prime rate within the USA. The prices for raw materials could decrease initially. Over the long term strong economic growth in the USA would give a fundamental boost to petroleum prices however, which would benefit Russia. According to Troika Dialog domestic factors have also contributed to the recovery of the market, such as the decrease in inflation and the economic upturn. Many observers are calculating economic growth of around 3 percent for the coming year. Russia has also shown a friendlier attitude towards foreign capital....

One of my favorite blogs, Business Monitor International's Risk Watchdog, had a post yesterday discussing the wider historical context of the Berlin Wall's fall. The discussion of the persistence of Communism and the comparison between 1979 and 1989 I personally found to be the most thought-provoking observations but the entire posting is worth reading, accessible here.

Observation 6: Communism did not entirely die.

China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and Laos all retain Communist leaderships, although in the former two countries the free market has largely prevailed. Many of the 'Communists' in Eastern Europe merely changed their names to 'social democrats' and returned to power, albeit in reconstructed form. Overall, the phenomenon of significant state interventionism in economies lives on long after 1989,

...

"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain

David Satter, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and visiting scholar at SAIS, has done an amazing thing to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has taken a topic which normally takes about 1,000 words just to introduce, and distilled one of its principal lessons for today's geopolitical arena into just about 1,000 words.

In particular, and very significantly, he closes in on what continues to be one of the defining struggles of our time: the challenge of engaging with an ideology that leaves no room for alternative discourse. Twenty years ago, that ideology was Communism. Today it

...

Ariel Cohen and Richard Ericson have a new paper discussing Russia's economic crisis and its relations with the United States. I would encourage reading this paper in full as it hits on all the major factors relevant to Russia's economic situation though I will warn up front that a fair number of you will take exception to their interpretation of some of those factors. In addition there a couple of points that the authors have either overlooked or simply assumed readers would already be aware of that I think are worth spelling out briefly first.

The first has to do with the recommendations the authors make for US policy. I have no major disagreements with the recommendations themselves, but would argue that executing most of them depend on Putin being out of the picture, among other things.

Another point regards the China

...