Paul Goble has a good report summarizing an argument from Vadim Dubnov published in Gazeta.ru about Russia's business of politics - how having so many officials with multi-million dollar business interests creates, well, conflicts of interest, to put it lightly. Any corporation in any country, he says, "objectively will look for chances to take over part of the power of the state, but a normal - that is one not like [Russia's] - corporation long ago rejected romantic ideas of subordinating the [entire] state to itself." Not only is that task not easy, but in the minds of mosst corporate leaders in most countries, it is not worthwhile.What has happened in Russia is tragic in another sense, Dubnov goes on to say. "A state which has been converted into a corporation does not develop even its own corporative thinking" but rather remains a prisoner ...

Russia Profile is running one of those panel things they do with various experts on the first decade of Russia under Vladimir Putin.  The praise, as may be expected, is effusive and largely uncritical.  Sometimes its even convincing (funny the kinds of universities where the pro-Putin academics tend to work...).  Ethan Burger takes up the role of the dissenting voice again on this one, with this commentary:

I urge the readers of this panel to read the recently published United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Human Development Report for the Russian Federation. The report was prepared largely by Russian experts. Appropriately, its title is "Russia Facing Demographic Challenges." The report attempts to analyze the main aspects of the most urgent demographic challenges, to offer analysis

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Good late morning, afternoon from Washington DC.  Before I make my way out to the airport to fly back home to London, I thought I would catch up on some of the weekend's news.Speaking of travel, over the years our correspondent in Russia, Grigory Pasko, has done an inordinate amount of reporting on this blog about the unfortunate conditions of the roads in so many parts of the regions.  Though perhaps peculiar to an outsider, anyone who has traveled to Russia and bothered to get outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg, would understand our fixation on this routine minutae of transportation infrastructure. By comparison, I recall driving along ...

When wide scale protests over wage arrears broke out in the town of Pikalyovo, near St. Petersburg, this past June, Vladimir Putin leaped into action to put out the fire.  He toured the factories, met with protest leaders, called the Kremlin-loyal business magnate Oleg Deripaska a "greedy cockroach," and then offered to solve all the problems directly with funds out of the state budget.  Someone even made a spoof song about Putin's macho image and the rescuing of Pikalyovo ("Putin, Putin goes to Pikalyovo. Putin, Putin will make it cool for us," the Russian lyrics say as a bearded man in a suit gyrates. "Putin, Putin is quick to do justice. Putin, Putin is our Prime Minister.")It ...

Below is an interesting take by Yulia Latynina on the Pikalyovo public scolding of Oleg Deripaska by Vladimir Putin.  Paul Goble made a similar comment in his video interview with us.  Also see yesterday's CNN piece on Deripaska, embedded after the cut.The Pikalyovo incident is a classic example of how the Kremlin makes decisions. The roles and script are assigned in advance. First, Putin gets demonstratively angry at one of his court oligarchs. Then, Putin makes a decision ostensibly "for the benefit of the people,"  but since his decision is based on information provided by the oligarch in question, the oligarch walks away with everything he wanted -- and more. Why does Putin allocate state funds for uncompetitive factories and on terms that are kept secret from the public? Perhaps the government is ...

Paul Goble is covering this story about the extremist group, Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), which is making a bid for mainstream respectability.  The success and acceptance of this group is, well, very disappointing.  DPNI and many other similar movements have alarmingly grown in size and influence in Putin's Russia under the banner of "Russia for Russians," and other slogans which at times dovetail with the statist "Nashi" narrative.  With a rapidly shrinking population (140 million, smaller than Pakistan), Russia faces the prospect of having to attract and incorporate a very large number of immigrants over the short term to remain competitive and continue the bid to regain "superpower" status.  This xenophobic attitude appears at odds with Russia's potential ...

I am still digging up good clips from my last interview with Paul Goble.  Here he reacts to the argument from Anatol Lieven's National Interest article which argued that Piontkovsky, Shevtsova, and other Russian liberals serve as "an asset to Putin in terms of boosting public hostility to Russian liberalism that if they hadn't already existed, Putin might have been tempted to invent them."  See more reactions here and here.

Der Spiegel has supposedly obtained confidential documents written by the EU team led by Ambassador Heidi Tagliavini that is investigating the war last summer. There are quite a few interesting little nuggets in Der Spiegel's write-up. Here are a few:

The confidential investigative commission documents, which SPIEGEL has obtained, show that the task of assigning blame for the conflict has been as much of a challenge for the commission members as it has for the international community. However, a majority of members tend to arrive at the assessment that Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili started the war by attacking South Ossetia on August 7, 2008. The facts assembled on Tagliavini's desk refute Saakashvili's claim that his country became the innocent victim of "Russian aggression" on that day.

The experts found no evidence to support claims by the Georgian president, which he also mentioned

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Some more shots are exchanged over the realism vs. liberalism issue.  From Paul Goble's Window on Eurasia:In an essay posted on Grani.ru today, Irina Pavlova points out that "the post-Soviet powers that be have done everything to revile and marginalize the liberal idea in Russia and those few liberals who were and remain the true supporters of this idea," something that the liberals themselves assisted by their involvement in the nomenklatura privatization of the 1990s.But with the coming to power of Vladimir Putin in 2000 and his efforts to demonize that period and "strengthen the regime," the situation became even more dire for liberals as the Russian government moved in a direction which even its apologists in Russia and the West say is "little distinguished from a dictatorship." That the Kremlin should have done so is ...

Recently the Russian industrial town of Pikalyovo exploded in protests over unemployment and wage arrears - prompting Putin to fly in for a big media visit, which involved a public dressing down of Kremlin loyalist businessman Oleg Deripaska and an immediate payout to the protestors from the state budget.  This was followed by a threat from President Medvedev to fire any governors who show themselves incapable of handling economic unrest.  These incidents both represent an important indication of how the Russian government is handling social unrest related to the global economic crisis.  Paul Goble, a blogger and former state department diplomat (among many other former postings), recently met with me in Dupont Circle, Washington DC, to discuss the Pikalyovo incident....