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 ...

As many readers are aware, the Russian government has been on a recent censorship tear, including talk of banning off-color and proudly offensive animated TV imports such as The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park (oddly, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez has already done the same).  No reason to stop at TV shows.  Today we're seeing reports that the government has ordered Russian retailers to pull the video game title Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 from its shelves while a ban on the game is considered.  The game, which pits players in bloody gunfights in a slew of imaginary international conflict zones, is already being called one of the decade's most successful product launches - hitting $310 million in one day alone....

Vladimir Putin has been ranked number 3 in the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world, President Medvedev comes in 43rd, after Deputy Prime Minister, siloviki chieftain and Rosneft chairman Igor Sechin at number 42. (See the editor's choice for Russia's top seven.) Forbes has got a special feature on the politician the Russian press apparently call 'the scariest person on earth'. There is little solid information about the man. Like many of Putin's cronies, Sechin is a St. Petersburg native. In the 1990s he worked in city government. Before that, it's widely believed he was a spy; Moscow sources confirm that he was a member of the GRU, the KGB's foreign-intelligence arm. ...

TODAY: Youtube policeman faces slander investigation; Omsk students threatened with expulsion; Committee to Protect Journalists urge global attention to threats against media in Russia. Merkel thanks Gorbachev; Medvedev approves new military bill; advocates abolition of death penalty. Delay for Gazprom eyesore?; Nobel Prize winning physicist dies; Kalashnikov goes on; gangsters' idea of cemetery chic. Corruption-highlighting policeman Alexei Dymovsky is now facing three investigations after posting a video address to Putin lamenting the state of the police, including an Investigative Committee examination of whether the policeman's accusations hold any truth; another investigation is against Dymovsky himself, for slander.  Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev has already ordered an investigation into the Novorossiisk police force and suspended Dymovsky ...

It felt as if negotiations would go on for an eternity, with months of stalling: search this site for 'Opel bid' and the stories of stops and starts come thick and fast.  Now, just as it seemed that the deal was finally coming to a close, comes the spectacular announcement that GM will not in fact sell off its loss-making European unit Opel to the consortium of Canadian part-maker Magna and Russia's Sberbank, preferring to restructure it itself as the economic climate warms.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had pledged €4.5bn in loans may well be fuming and apparently Prime Minister Putin has chimed in with his consternation over the abortive deal, which had promised ...

After months of painstaking negotiations, GM has scrapped the Opel sale on the basis that it was 'no longer in the best interests of GM, now that the environment for car sales has started to improve', reports the Independent.  The decision comes just after Opel's labor force had agreed to contribute $390 million in annual savings.  'Management had planned a release saying that they will proceed with Magna, so there must have been a fundamental change of view within the board', the FT quotes an insider as saying.  The Russian government is planning to raise $1.87 billion to bail out ailing carmaker Avtovaz, most of which will be apparently allotted to bad debts, and some of which will be allocated to modernization and on job creation, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has reportedly announced.  Daimler Trucks will proceed ...

Jason Bush in Forbes suggests that Russia's recovery may be buoyant: 'while the Russian government is still cautiously forecasting 2 percent GDP growth in 2010, many independent economists are already predicting growth of as much as 5 percent next year'.  Oleg Deripaska's heavily-indebted RusAl has made a deal to sell 1.68 million tons of aluminum to Chinese state corporation Norinco over seven years.  Renault COO Patrick Pelata has told the press that whilst the French car giant will support bankruptcy-skirting Avtovaz, the company will not supply the cash booster shot that the Russians allegedly want.  Corporate loan portfolios and overdue corporate loans fell slightly in September, as the ruble gained in value.  The Russian Gold Industrialists Union has announced that gold production rose 14.6% in the first nine months of 2009, year-on-year, an increase they attributed to a number ...

The following is a translation of an article about the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky published in the French weekly magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur.

The Convict who Frightens the Kremlin From our special correspondent in Moscow

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, former head of oil company Yukos, is serving eight years in prison in Siberia. He is again judged in a trial in which the arbitrary rivals absurdity. The Russian power in the hands of Putin, does not want to see out of prison the person who was formerly the richest man in the country...

It is in this tiny and outdated courtroom No. 7 on the second floor of the Khamovnitchesky District Court of

...

David Clark, chair of the Russia Foundation, has a good piece in the Financial Times about Russia's rejection of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), which will come into effect this coming Monday.  Although Clark makes some good points regarding some overly aggressive moves by the Russian government which may dampen demand, it is harder to say if investors will ever actually take a hint and move on to less risky countries - they shown no lack of appetite of risk so far, and keep coming back for more punishment.If rejecting a major international treaty was intended as a demonstration of unilateral Russian power, it may instead backfire and expose the underlying fragility of Russia's national revival. As Mr Medvedev himself acknowledged last month, in what was taken as an oblique criticism of his predecessor, the Russian economy remains dangerously lopsided in its dependence on ...

One criticism that you not likely to hear about the Russian government is its lack of enthusiastic applications of new media technologies.  The Prime Minister posts his topless photos at a much more timely rate that the White House page is updated, the President has impressive blogs and video podcasts, they've got a school of bloggers to push the official government line and drown out online dissent, and now, Dmitry Rogozin, Russia's envoy to NATO, has got himself a pretty robust Twitter feed in English and Russian going on right here.This is particularly fun stuff to read, and not just because Rogozin's essential professional function is to be like a Russian version of John Bolton before ...