#2
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
August 8, 2015
More than just a pretty face: The secrets of the Russian matryoshka
When asked what to bring home from Russia as a souvenir, there's one thing people are guaranteed to say: "A Russian doll, what else?" But the lacquered wooden "matryoshka" is not an exclusively Russian creation - and it is also a lot younger than many people believe. RBTH finds out a little about the history of the doll, a history which - like the toy itself - contains a few surprises.
Elena Kostomarova, special to RBTH
 
Step inside any souvenir store in Russia and there they are: rows and rows of gleaming bulbous stylized women, a rosy-cheeked, bright-eyed face surrounded by bright colors and traditional ornamentation. Twist off the top half of one of these wooden dolls and you will find an identical, smaller replica inside. And inside that one, another, and inside that one, another...

The Russian doll, or matryoshka, to use the Russian name, is one of the most recognizable symbols of Russia - but while many see it as an example of the nation's ancient traditions of woodworking and decorative handicrafts, the matryoshka is in fact far younger than it would appear. In fact, it dates back only to the late 19th century.

So what are the origins of this famous nesting doll? The word matryoshka comes from the name Matryona, which was very popular in the 19th century. The name means "respectable lady," "mother of the family," or "mummy."
 
Fertility symbol

"For all Russians the matryoshka is obviously Matryona, the embodiment of woman's health, fertility, a wonderful female disposition and a symbol of the family," explained Yelena Titova, director of the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art in Moscow.

But what was the inspiration for the matryoshka? Throughout history the image of the stout and happy woman, the features that characterize the matryoshka, has been used as a symbol of fertility in various cultures. It is enough to remember the Ancient Greek Paleolithic Venuses, the figurines that archeologists found in many European countries, and the Chinese, Japanese and Indian toys that were created with a similar technique.

According to one version, a relative of the Russian matryoshka is the roly-poly doll personifying the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, who was one of the chief mentors of the ancient religion and founder of the Shaolin Monastery. His name in Japanese is Daruma. This name was used for a doll made of papier mache, notable for its solidity.

The Kokeshi doll, which served as a talisman for children, is also notable for its resemblance to the matryoshka. However, this Japanese doll bears a closer similarity to Russian straw dolls, which could be found in all peasant homes in the past.

The most probable candidate for the title of the matryoshka's older brother is the Japanese elder Fukurumu. Inside this wooden sculpture of the God of Wisdom there were another six figurines painted as his relatives or as other little Japanese gods.
 
A wind from the east

Some believe that the prototype of the matryoshka was brought to Russia from Japan in the 1800s by the wife of famous art patron Savva Mamontov. In the second half of the 19th century a vogue for everything eastern swept over Russia: clothes, prints, statuettes. Even Emperor Nicholas II carried a netsuke in his pocket as a talisman.

The story goes that Mamontov asked artist Sergei Malyutin to make something similar. However, according to Yelena Titova from the All-Russian Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art, the story is just that and there is no proof that the Russian matryoshka was "copied" from any concrete Japanese brother.
"The matryoshka appeared as a result of an artistic project during the Art Nouveau epoch, which involved the use of eastern traditions," said Titova. "The influence of art from the east was definitely significant, but it had a general character."
 
From one-off to tourist staple

One way or another, the first Russian matryoshka appeared at the end of the 1890s in the Children's Education workshop in Moscow. Its creators were turner Vasily Zvezdochkin and artist Sergei Malyutin. In 1900 the toy was exhibited at the Universal Exhibition in Paris. The colorful doll was recognized as the best dissembling toy both from the educational and the technical points of view, creating a real craze amidst the public and receiving a bronze medal.

Before the 1930s painted toys were generally works created by individual artists. The wooden figurines were painted not only by artist-craftsmen but also by representatives of the Russian avant-garde, which was fascinated by the Russian Revival style of the 1800s. In the middle of the 1930s factory production of the matryoshka was introduced, thanks to which it eventually obtained the status of the country's main souvenir.

From the 1990s onward the matryoshka in Russia became a unique canvas for the self-expression of various types of artists. All foreign tourists visiting Russia in that period remember the souvenir rows on Moscow's Arbat with the differently painted matryoshkas representing politicians, pop stars, and actors, sometimes as caricatures. Even today visitors to Moscow and St. Petersburg will find nesting dolls featuring a succession of Russian leaders, from current president Vladimir Putin back to Peter the Great.

The doll also underwent thousands of experiments in color, form and size, with the record sample consisting of 80 pieces.

"Regardless of all the changes that the matryoshka went through in the years following her birth, which were difficult years in the first quarter of the 20th century, revolutionary years, she became the key element of Russian crafts," said Titova. "There has always been a demand for the matryoshka, both as a children's toy and as a gift, and the doll has always been a symbol of the family.
---
The exhibition "Neprostaya Igrushka" (No Simple Toy) is on the display at the Museum of Decorative, Applied and Folk Art in Moscow until Sept. 13. Visitors can see nesting dolls from the late 19th century and Soviet examples made at factories in Sergiev Posad and the Bashkiria and Mordovia republics. More information and directions to the museum: http://www.vmdpni.ru/data/events/2015/07/neprostaya_igrushka/index.php?lang=en

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#3
Buzzfeed.com
August 7, 2015
23 Signs You Were Raised By Russian Parents
Take off your shoes, grab a blanket, and read this (while sitting up).
By Miriam Elder
Miriam Elder is the world editor for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York.
[Photos here http://www.buzzfeed.com/miriamelder/23-signs-you-were-raised-by-russian-parents#.shjvgAlP3]

1. You were always being told to cover your head when it was cold.

2. Except when you were being told, "Don't go out with wet hair! You'll get meningitis!"

3. Wearing a dress without pantyhose? Haha, nice try.

4. Everything was bad luck. Whistle inside? Good job, you just ensured yourself a life with no money.

5. Actually, you were always being told a lot of things would rain destruction upon you, like reading lying down, which would basically leave you blind.

6. You never threw away a plastic bag, but saved them in a drawer.

7. The "nice" shopping bags got their own drawer.

8. Every pickle jar, jam jar, anything jar was promptly cleaned, repurposed and used as tupperware.

9. You had at least one of these blankets in your home. Probably two.

10. One out of every two people you knew from the old country was an engineer.

11. Dropping lines from Pushkin poems or centuries old sayings was just what you did in conversation.

12. Family gatherings meant hearing, "We're not arguing, we're just discussing!"

13. Potatoes are to be boiled. Soup is to be had at every meal.

14. Most families had wine glasses. You had great heavy crystal chalices.

15. Birthdays meant fielding phonecalls from every uncle, aunt, second cousin, and family friend, saying: "I wish you health, happiness, and success in your personal life."

16. Telling your friends to take their shoes off once they got in the house was always a treat.

17. You were pretty sure books were meant to be bought as series - the collected works of [every Russian writer who ever lived].

18. Your parents always praised the wonders of American medicine - but kept a few bottles of the magical Russian stuff stashed around the house.

19. It was only when you started going to school that you learned sandwiches came with two pieces of bread, not just one.

20. While your friends were busy playing poker, you were playing durak.

21. Novoe Russkoe Slovo was all the news that's fit to print (in Russian and a month or three late).

22. When the U.S. took a political decision they didn't agree with, the first thing you heard was: "This country is turning into the Soviet Union!"

23. It all makes sense. They're Russians.

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 #4
New York Times
August 9, 2015
Kazan, a Russian Cultural Hub, Finds It's Good at Sports
By KAREN CROUSE

KAZAN, Russia - In his first trip abroad, Michael Weiss visited a place he had a hard time locating on a map. Was Kazan a sports destination or an exclamation popularized by the television character Gomer Pyle?

Weiss arrived with the United States swim team competing at the 2013 World University Games and eyed the decrepit Soviet-era buildings juxtaposed with new construction in the crane-filled skyline. He noted the mosques side by side with churches, the gun-toting troops patrolling entrances, and a few recognizable United States-based fast-food chains.

And he became more disoriented.

How to make sense of all these sports complexes coated in construction dust inside a fortress?

Weiss left with gold and silver medals, a World University Games record in the 400-meter individual medley and an appreciation of the ancient city's newfound embrace of sports. When Weiss returned last week with the American team competing in the 16th FINA world championships, he knew what to expect.

"The Russians put on a great meet," he said.

Situated at the confluence of the Volga and Kazanka Rivers, Kazan is the capital of the republic of Tatarstan. With a population of 1.2 million, it is Russia's eighth-largest city. It is known for its large industrial and financial center and sizable student population, and for being a melting pot that never approaches the boiling stage.

"It is a powerful place in terms of people, in terms of culture, in terms of working habits," said the nine-time Russian Olympic medalist Alexander Popov, one of the career sprint greats.

"Everything is quite strong here."

Popov added: "There are a lot of people from different religions who live here, and they live all together in one place peaceably. No conflicts or anything. In Russia, people actually use the example of the Kazan region as peaceful types of people."

A cultural hub for 1,000 years, the city has spent the decade since its 2005 millennium celebration reinventing itself as the cynosure of Russian sports.

Since 2007, the city has hosted world and European competitions in field hockey, ice hockey, fencing, boxing, bandy and weight lifting. In the years ahead, it will welcome international visitors for a major rhythmic gymnastics event, an extreme sports event modeled after the X Games and two significant soccer tournaments: the 2017 Confederations Cup and the 2018 World Cup.

The soccer matches, including six World Cup qualifying games and a quarterfinal, will be held at the 45,000-seat Kazan Arena, where two temporary pools were constructed for last week's swimming competition. Before one of her preliminary races, the American Missy Franklin limbered up by dribbling a soccer ball. Meeting with the news media afterward, she explained that she wanted to be able to tell people she had played soccer in a World Cup stadium.

Viktoria Zeynep Gunes, a 17-year-old individual-medley swimmer and breaststroker, spoke another day about her disappointment in not making any finals. The last 14 months have been tumultuous for Gunes, who won a world junior title in 2013 for her native Ukraine. She fled her homeland last year with her family after Russia invaded the Ukrainian territory of Crimea.

They settled in Istanbul, and the world championships were Gunes's first major competition in which she represented Turkey. Despite the circumstances behind her family's abrupt relocation, she professed to be happy racing in Russia. She said she enjoyed catching up with her friends from the host country and Ukraine. "There are no problems here," Gunes said. "This is outside politics."

To Vladimir Leonov, Tatarstan's sports minister, an American and native Ukrainian mingling companionably with Russians reflect the power and glory of sports. It is a potent image for Leonov, who was born here. "Kazan, it's my life, like in the song," he said, chuckling.

Leonov regards sports as a vehicle of modernization. They are a means of upgrading lives more stealthily and healthily than by taking a bulldozer to tradition, as happened in the city when some of its historic districts were demolished to make room for contemporary structures.

For the World University Games, facilities were built to accommodate 27 sports, Leonov said. "We used 64 venues, and half of them we built especially for the competition," he added.

Highways were widened, the subway and train infrastructure received a face-lift, and a 40,000-bed village rose from the sandy soil, to be used by the athletes during various competitions and to house students the rest of the time. Leonov said 70 percent of the financing for the projects had come from the federal government, and the rest from the municipal government and corporate sponsorships.

"The main legacy we have here is we change people," Leonov said. "We have people in the new generation coming to power in the government, business, media, with a new spirit, a new vision of life. They're open, very international."

There are still pockets of the city where English is not spoken and where taxi drivers refuse to ferry English speakers. When it rains, it pours, and the roads turn into tributaries that flow into the Volga and Kazanka Rivers. But as Leonov said, many of the world championship volunteers were young and eager to try out their English, and when they spoke, they talked about student trips across the United States and dream excursions to the major American cities.

A water polo player in his youth, Leonov said he tried to swim a mile every day. "You must have some exercise," said Leonov, who plans to compete this week in the freestyle at the world masters championships, which will move into Kazan Arena after the Olympic-caliber swimmers move out. "Not for some high results, but for health."

He was seated in a luxury box until his turn came to hand out awards during a ceremony on the pool deck. From his fluency in English to his physical fitness, Leonov practices what he preaches.

"This development of Kazan as the sports capital of Russia," he said, "it's a good legacy

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 #5
Russia Beyond the Headlines
www.rbth.ru
August 6, 2015
Russians fight to keep derelict church from sinking beneath the waters
Volunteers from all over Russia are working in the Vologda Region to save a unique monument of 18th-century architecture - the Church of the Nativity in the village of Krokhino - from destruction. For 50 years, it has been surrounded by water after the village was flooded during the construction of the Volga-Baltic Canal in 1964.
Tatyana Kutarenkova, special to RBTH
[Photos here http://rbth.com/society/2015/08/06/russians_fight_to_keep_derelict_church_from_sinking_beneath_the_water_48311.html]

An ancient Russian legend tells of the invisible city of Kitezh, which sank beneath the waters of Lake Svetloyar in central Russia when Mongol invaders approached it in the 13th century, never to be seen again.

Seven hundred years later, in the 20th century, the fate of the mythical city of Kitezh became a tragic reality for hundreds of villages in Russia, when after World War II a massive artificial widening and deepening of the country's rivers began - for the passage of large vessels or construction of hydropower plants.

Entire villages and small towns became flooded and thousands of people were forced to abandon their houses.

The most famous example is Kalyazin, in the Tver Region north of Moscow, where today a lonely bell tower in the middle of a lake is all that is left of the old town, submerged during the construction of the Uglich Hydroelectric Station in 1940.

A quarter of a century later, the same fate was to befall the village of Krokhino, located on the banks of the Sheksna River in the Vologda Region, 400 miles north of Moscow.

For centuries here there were noisy fairs, fish and grain were sold, boats were built, and every day the bells of the Church of the Nativity summoned the villagers to prayer.

After the establishment of the Soviet regime, the church was not destroyed, but was turned first into the village club, then a workshop and finally into a drying house for grain.

But in 1964, during the construction of the deep-water Volga-Baltic Canal, the water level in the Sheksna River was artificially raised - and the village was submerged by the lake, leaving only the white-stone church rising out of the water.

With the passage of time, the ancient stone structure, whose bell tower was used as a beacon for passing ships, began to sink in the wet soil, while the walls began to crumble from the waves of passing vessels.
 
The tide turns

But the fate of the marooned church was to change one day in 2009, when Muscovite Anor Tukayeva happened to come in her car to the shores of the Sheksna reservoir.

Six years earlier, Tukayeva was working as an expert in the field of state and municipal government. One day she saw a documentary about the construction of the Volga-Baltic Canal and was fascinated by this little-known page of history. She definitely decided to see the legendary church with her own eyes.
"Once in Krokhino, I realized how easily we could lose this defenseless architectural creation for good," she said.

Tukayeva wrote letters to government agencies but did not find any support. However, like-minded people gradually started gathering around her, eventually resulting in the formation of the Krokhino charity project. Tukayeva took the first group of volunteers to the drowned village in 2011.

To get close to the church was only possible by boat or speedboat. Once on the island, the volunteers first began to dismantle the rubble. From the wreckage of the walls, they built a dam.

They restored the stonework of the undermined walls, underpinned the shallow boulder foundation under it, erected a buttress to strengthen the northern wall of the porch and fixed the broken beams of the bell tower. Then they started laying a path to the church across the swamps.

"My husband initially thought that my passion would soon pass. But then he realized that this was serious. He got a captain's license and now helps the volunteers to go to the temple by boat," said Tukayeva.
 
Only the first steps

Volunteer shifts are held eight times a season. A volunteer's day in Krokhino begins almost at dawn. After an early breakfast, the volunteers, aged from 16 to 72, depart to the island, where work is in full swing until sunset.

"We put broken bricks in the bags - these are to strengthen the dam. We set whole ones aside - for the restoration of stonework," explains Yana Safronova, a German teacher who came to Krokhino from Moscow. Safronova labors alongside her friend Tatyana Zaitseva, a teacher at a children's architectural and art school.

Zaitseva is busy strengthening stonework with other volunteers. This is not an easy task, as mortar dries quickly and needs to be applied to the places where the stonework has crumbled before it solidifies.

This is not yet restoration, but primary emergency response work. The main thing for the time being is to preserve the structure and not to let it decay from water and wind.

Until recently, the project was carried out by volunteers on their own, without any outside help and with minimal financial support. "But now we must rise to the level of professional engineering work - so we have launched a crowdfunding campaign," said Tukayeva.

A series of videos in support of the revival of the church in Krokhino featuring well-known Russian actors and TV presenters has been launched on the project's Facebook page.

It is unlikely that the Church of the Nativity in Krokhino will be able to gather believers within its walls again any time soon. But it will certainly be more than a sight; it will be a monument to all the Kitezhes of the 20th century that have vanished under the water.

#6
Bloomberg
August 9, 2015
Russia Takes On Louvre, Guggenheim as Putin Fights Pariah Status
By Henry Meyer

Since it opened in March, the Russian Museum in Malaga, the southern Spanish coastal resort, has been thronged by visitors who line up to see centuries-old icons and works by 20th century avant-garde artists Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Marc Chagall.

The St. Petersburg landmark's only foreign branch is part of an effort along with the former imperial capital's State Hermitage Museum to stake their places on the map alongside international peers like the Guggenheim and Louvre. The drive, which has endured even amid the worst tensions between Moscow and Europe since the Cold War, was initially out of step with the Kremlin's isolationist course. Now it could help President Vladimir Putin as he cautiously seeks to rebuild ties.

"At a time of extremely difficult ties with Europe, it's great to break through the isolation," Vladimir Gusev, the director of the Russian Museum, said in an interview in St. Petersburg. "Sometimes culture and art can achieve things that politicians can't."

The Hermitage, which was founded by Empress Catherine II in 1764 and boasts one of the world's largest collections of Western art, is to open a branch in Barcelona in 2017, its second satellite outside of Russia after Amsterdam.

Global Ambitions

The Russian Museum, whose collection from the 11th to 21st centuries represent the world's biggest store of Russian art, says it is considering branches in Abu Dhabi and Brazil.

The museums say international audiences are eager. A Kandinsky exhibit staged mainly with works from the Russian Museum has attracted almost 2 million visitors since January in four Brazilian cities, said Gusev.

Still, touting Russia's role in European culture hasn't been easy with the Kremlin's official line going the opposite way. The Russian government has provided no funding for the museums' expansion plans, officials said.

"Now it's not very fashionable to say it, but we are not just a Russian museum, we are a museum for the world," Hermitage director Mikhail Piotrovsky said in an interview in his office in St. Petersburg's Winter Palace. On his desk, he keeps a framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth II, who visited the museum on a royal tour of Russia in 1994.

Piotrovsky started the international push a decade and a half ago by opening temporary branches in London and Las Vegas that have since closed. He said the expansion is entirely funded by foreign hosts and private fundraising.

Politics Intrudes

"Everything we are doing is to show that culture is above politics and cultural relations go on even if the political situation is bad because culture is forever and political situations change when politicians want them to," said Piotrovsky.

But politics often intrudes.

Piotrovsky says any plans to loan art internationally must now get special legal exemptions from host countries to ensure no artworks are at risk of seizure by courts seeking to enforce rulings against Russia. The latest threat: a $50 billion international-arbitration verdict in favor of some of the former shareholders of bankrupt Russian oil giant Yukos Oil Co. Moscow denounces the judgment as politicized and illegitimate.

A separate legal tangle between the U.S. and Russia over the ownership of an archive of Jewish books effectively blocks the Russian collections from going to the U.S.

The Hermitage in 2007 had to close its subsidiary in London's Somerset House after local sponsorship dried up because of the murder of dissident Russian intelligence agent Alexander Litvinenko in the British capital.

'Profitable Investment'

Still, the Hermitage and Russian Museum have successfully pushed to keep alive ties with the outside world.

At the Amsterdam Hermitage, inaugurated in 2009 by then President Dmitry Medvedev, Piotrovsky in September attended the opening of the exhibition "Dining with the Tsars," only a few weeks after a Malaysian passenger aircraft was shot down over eastern Ukraine. The crash, blamed by the U.S. and its allies on a Russian missile fired by pro-Moscow rebels, killed 193 Dutch citizens among the 298 people on board who lost their lives.

Malaga's top museum official, Jose Maria Luna Aguilar, says business drove the decision to bring in the Russian Museum, which opened its doors in a former tobacco factory just days before Paris's Centre Pompidou inaugurated its first foreign outpost in the Spanish city.

"I'm not going to enter into politics, but I can tell you this is a very profitable investment for Malaga," he said in a phone interview.

Havana Branch

In Barcelona, the Hermitage has taken care to secure support from the central authorities in Madrid as well as the Catalan regional government.

The Hermitage's planned branch has every chance to be a success because it's in a city that is "really oriented to tourism and has a really deep interest in high culture," says the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation's director, Richard Armstrong. The Guggenheim's branch in the Spanish city of Bilbao has attracted a million visitors a year since it was founded in 1997, he said by phone from New York.

For its next international move, the Russian Museum is relying on decades-old Soviet ties to open a branch in Havana -- where the tourist industry is set to benefit from a thawing of U.S.-Cuban ties.
 

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 #7
Russia Insider
www.russia-insider.com
August 10, 2015
Talk to Russia? Yes We Can!
The US talks to many countries with which it disagrees.  Why not to Russia?
By Julian Henry Lowenfeld

Julian Henry Lowenfeld is an author, poet, and prize-winning translator of Russian poetry, celebrated in Russia for his renditions of Pushkin.

He is the translator of Everyday Saints, the #1 best-selling book in Russia for the last 4 years, by Father Tikhon Shevkunov. The English edition is a runaway success in the US and England.

A revised and expanded edition of his seminal dual-language book, My Talisman (2010), a biography of Pushkin with translations of 140 poems, will be released in September 2015 by Moskvovedeniye Publishers in Moscow.

He spends time between his native New York City and Moscow.

This piece was originally submitted to the New York Times Op Ed page, but was turned down.
--

The idea which staved off war came "off the cuff."  At a coffee break at the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg in 2013, Putin suggested to Obama putting Syria's chemical weapons under UN control for later demolition. Done. A breakthrough from just 20 minutes' chat.  

What might our leaders have achieved in full-length talks? We can only wonder: Obama cancelled their previously planned separate summit, citing "our lack of progress on missile defense and arms control, trade and commercial relations, global security issues, and human rights and civil society."  

Sure, Obama disagrees with Putin on many things. But do disagreements really justify not even talking?  That's not what we tell the Israelis and the Palestinians, despite their lack of progress over decades.

Why doesn't Obama cancel summits with China's Xi Jinping despite "irrefutable evidence"... "that Chinese Army Unit 61398 was involved in direct cyber-attacks on Federal agencies and major U.S. corporations,"  even when the Pentagon complains of China's "deliberate strategy of direct hacking, massive economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, export control violations, and technology transfer."  China rattles sabres with Japan, enables North Korea, helps rogue regimes evade sanctions.  Trade? China cheats nonstop. The environment? China is the world's worst polluter. Human rights?  Ask the Tibetans or Falun Gong (even China's gays, routinely beaten or treated for "mental illness," forced into marriages, and otherwise hounded in ways which make the Russian ban on same-sex propaganda for minors seem a picnic).  

So why three summits with Premier Xi, yet just twenty minutes with President Putin?  Obama claimed "Russia's disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor." Was that Realpolitik  or pique? (What if a former employee of Russia's security services revealed a secret spy Russian program, and came to America seeking asylum? Is there any doubt we'd grant it?)  

"Lack of progress on arms control"? What did we expect after putting missile defense systems and F-22 Raptors right by Russia's border? Would we want Russian missiles in Mexico and Cuba?  As to Syria, Assad may be a monster, but why are we aiding thugs linked to Al-Qaeda and mass murderers whose atrocities against Christians, war prisoners, and countless civilians have been documented?  What of UN investigator Carla del Ponte's report that the rebels also used sarin?

And are we so impeccable? What's our track record?  In Afghanistan and Iraq we have "made a desolation and called it peace." In Libya, we promised "limited airstrikes" (sound familiar?) then blatantly effected régime change.  When Secretary of State Kerry called the proposed attack of Syria "unbelievably small," not  even the British believed him.  

As to the Ukrainian crisis, how is a solution conceivable without at least talking to Russia?

Why did Kerry fly to Paris instead of Moscow for the 70th anniversary of V-E Day?  Did the French win the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk? Did the French cause 85% of all German casualties in the war, while sacrificing 27 millions of their own people to free the world from Nazism, a grief that should be above all politics? Snubbing the Russian people's commemoration of their unequalled and undeniable heroism was frankly disgraceful.  No wonder it rankled.

If we can talk to the Chinese, Cubans and Iranians, why not the Russians too? The need for Russian-American dialogue transcends politics.  We're the world's two main nuclear powers.  Only together can we tackle such challenges as terrorism, drug and human trafficking, climate change, the crisis of the oceans, nuclear proliferation, preserving the Arctic and Antarctic, peacefully exploring space, and, yes, peace in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.  

Nobody says it'll be easy, but we must try.

Beneath our traditional rivalry, there is amity.  We've been allies before, and not just against Hitler.

"Friendship between Russia and America is an element essential to the universal political equilibrium.   Our two great lands, at two ends of the earth, are forever bound by a natural community of both interests and sympathies, a common interest in the spiritual as well as the material progress of mankind." 

So wrote Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov to President Abraham Lincoln, on July 10, 1861. Russia backed these words by sending its fleet to Boston, dissuading Britain, then the global superpower, from intervening in a terrible civil war - ours.

If only we could talk, we'd see how much our two peoples, spanning continents, proud of our exceptionalism and diversity, unique, yet both profoundly influenced by common Judeo-Christian values, share.  

We might even find a familiar freedom-loving spirit in Russia's national bard, Alexander Pushkin:

Rulers! Your crown and laurels do
Not come from God, but from Law's hand.
Above the people you do stand,
But Law Eternal stands o'er you.
 
See here for Youtube clip of the author reading his translation of Pushkin [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVVJKYQlVEs], and here for an interesting profile of the author (in Russian) on the main Russian evening news program "Vremya". [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxWFxBblO_8]

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 #8
BBC
August 10, 2015
How does Russia view the West?
By Bridget Kendall, Diplomatic correspondent

If you ask Western policy makers about the main security threats facing Europe, they come up with two: Jihadists from the so-called Islamic State and President Vladimir Putin's Russia.

The threat from jihadists is clear. But why Russia?

Western governments argue that by annexing Crimea and fomenting war in eastern Ukraine, Mr Putin not only violated Ukraine's sovereignty, he challenged Europe's borders and showed himself to be a dangerous and unpredictable leader.

They worry what he might do next.

So far a full-blown conflagration has not materialised.

Since the Minsk peace deal in February, it feels as though the Ukraine crisis has settled into an uneasy standoff.

Talks on the future of eastern Ukraine proceed with little progress. The ceasefire is being breached by both sides, leading to daily casualties.

Though Moscow denies it, Russian military involvement in rebel areas is widely reported and its soldiers have been captured. Western sanctions remain in place. Russia's relations with the West have soured on many fronts.

But there isn't actually a full-scale war going on.

So what should we expect next?

Assessing that is difficult. One reason Western planners are so nervous is because they are unsure how to read Russian intentions.

Reassuring and alarming

So recent comments by Lt Gen Evgeny Buzhinsky, one of Russia's most senior international military negotiators until he retired in 2009, may be helpful.

His long career in the Soviet and then Russian armed forces gave him a frontline role going back to the chilliest years of the Cold War. Now head of the PIR Centre, a prominent military think-tank in Moscow, he is in close contact with his former colleagues on the General Staff and in the Defence Ministry.

His assessment of where we stand is both reassuring and alarming. He rejects the idea of a potential Russian attack on the Baltic states as irrational. No doubt Baltic governments would be wary of taking that at face value.

But it is still interesting to hear a top Russian general argue that it would be foolhardy to attack a country protected by Nato. It suggests the Alliance's Article Five does act as a deterrent - even if some Nato publics seem lukewarm about the idea of coming to other countries' aid.
 
Gen Buzhinsky also thinks the risk of direct confrontation between Russia and the West has lessened in recent months in part, perhaps, because of the Minsk peace deal.

But he also identifies a shift in Russia's reading of US President Barack Obama's attitude towards arming Ukraine.

"If you supply weapons, then you have to send instructors, and it is a fairy tale that they can be somewhere in western Ukraine training Ukrainians, who then take the weapons and go east," says Gen Buzhinsky.

"Instructors should be on the front line. And if so, there should be casualties, losses, hostages and prisoners. And that would mean direct involvement of the US in the conflict.

"To my mind that is the reason why Obama is so unwilling to send lethal weapons."

Red line

At the same time Gen Buzhinsky issues a warning: He is very clear that if Kiev were to send troops across the ceasefire line to try to take back eastern Ukraine militarily, it would be a red line for Russia.

"If Kiev starts a major offensive on the pretext that they are being shelled... then Russia might interfere, and that of course will be war."

Of course, some might argue that Russia is already interfering, deeply involved in the Donbass region in what amounts to a secret war.

But Gen Buzhinsky seems to be talking about a full-scale invasion. It's a message he says he includes in all his conversations with Western officials - to get them to persuade Kiev to show restraint.

President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine insists any move to escalate the conflict is more likely to come from the Russian side.

One further interesting point: In the last year many top Russian military and security figures, including on occasion President Putin himself, have started to argue that the US is out to weaken and dismantle Russia in order to ensure its own supremacy.

This, they claim, is why Russia needs laws to denounce some NGOs as "foreign agents" and to shut down any "undesirable" organisations which are deemed to have overstepped the mark.

'Russia is European'

Yet Gen Buzhinsky does not see the West as his country's natural enemy. He openly dismisses the foreign agent law as "stupid".

Yes, he says, Russia has felt more of a threat from the West in the past two years. But no, he does not see Russia and the US as opponents.

"It is my strong belief that though we occupy part of Asia and part of Europe, Russia is a European country - in our way of thinking and everything. We are much closer to the US and Europe than to China, India and Korea.

"I do not think the Russian people even at the time of the Cold War considered Americans as enemies."

Can Russia and the West be allies? Or is Russia better off going it alone, or turning east?

This is the deeper issue behind the current crisis, which drives policy in Moscow. It is also a fundamental question about Russia's identity and culture which drives a fault line through Russian society.

Gen Buzhinsky's comments reveal that it divides the military elite as well.

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 #9
New York Times
August 9, 2015
A Moscow of Dancing Feet, Under an Iron Fist
By SABRINA TAVERNISE

MOSCOW - Russia's capital city has worn many outfits since the fall of the Soviet Union.

There was the tattered but hopeful garb of the first years, threadbare and full of possibility. Then came the leopard print fur of the 1990s, an era of stomach-churning economic collapse when the rich roared around in Mercedes sedans and everyone else suffered through the endless steeplechase of life under uncontrolled capitalism.

More recently, however, the city has donned a beautiful summer dress. There is a bike share program, Wi-Fi on the subway and free tango lessons in Gorky Park. Express trains now zip past traffic snarls to the airports and Uber taxis have replaced wheezing Soviet-era gypsy cabs. Cars park in real parking spaces and tow trucks haul them away if they do not.

But while Moscow looks ever more like an elegant European capital, its political life is marching steadily in the opposite direction. Last month, Russia's powerful state investigation committee proposed removing the principles of international human rights from the Constitution. The regional government in Sverdlovsk recently ordered schools to remove books by a British historian for what it said were inaccurate portrayals of Russian soldiers. Two American charities announced plans to close offices, citing the hostile environment.

For an outsider, the disconnect is dizzying. Which is the real Russia? The one besieged by foreign agents or the one where tattooed hipsters glide around on skateboards? And when - if ever - will those two worlds collide?

In many ways, Moscow is resurgent: a more beautiful, confident version of itself. Over the top has given way to casual elegance. On a recent afternoon at Uilliam's on Malaya Bronnaya Street, where duck ravioli with oranges was on the menu, patrons sat on small pillows near open windows, chatting, drinking wine and people-watching. In the park nearby, tired mothers slumped in beanbag chairs while their children screeched and climbed in an inflatable house.

But the rich are not the only beneficiaries. Russians are substantially better off since President Vladimir V. Putin first came to power in 2000. The average salary has roughly tripled, after inflation, and poverty has declined sharply, bringing a feeling of stability and well-being that was lacking in the 1990s. More Russians can now plan life in advance (Where will I go on vacation this year?) instead of snatching it a day at a time (What will I eat for dinner tomorrow?).

"It's so much more comfortable in the city now," said Denis Lebedev, a construction company worker, 33, sitting with his baby daughter on his lap near a pond in Tsarytsino, a meticulously planted park in southern Moscow. Traffic is tamed, mostly, and salaries are better.

"Now there are flowers," his wife, Anya Lebedeva, said of the city parks as she adjusted a plate of pickles on their picnic blanket.

Even the old seems new. Backstage at the Bolshoi Theater on a recent night, dozens of dancers, jubilant and sweaty, mingled with adoring members of Moscow's high society after the premiere of a new Russian ballet. It was a sumptuous display, blending modern and classical ballet with the 19th-century Russian novel "A Hero of Our Time," which had never been adapted for dance before.

"Magnificent, just magnificent," a man in a dark blue suit who stepped onto the stage said to Ilya Demutsky, the young composer from St. Petersburg who wrote the score.

The pomp can also signal something darker, however. On a recent Sunday morning, Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, was blessing the newly restored St. Vladimir Church in central Moscow. Priests swung incense from silver censers that tinkled like bells underneath the soaring ceilings and gilded chandeliers, the glittering pageantry captured by a long line of television cameras. A day later, Mr. Putin came for a private showing. The patriarch's sermon included fiery comments on Ukraine.

"And when we are told today that someone from outside has destroyed the unity of the Ukrainian people," he said, referring to the criticism of Russia's military action in Ukraine, "we answer, 'Be quiet!' " He went on to explain that hundreds of years of discord imposed by the West had divided Ukraine, and only church unity could save it.

Another projector of Russian patriotism is a surgeon-turned-motorcycle enthusiast named Alexander Zaldostanov. His nationalist motorcycle gang, the Night Wolves, last year performed a garish reconstruction of the war in Ukraine that featured Nazis with torches representing Ukrainian nationalists manipulated by a giant set of American hands.

In stuffy room packed with journalists last month, Mr. Zaldostanov, soaking up attention like a seal in the sun, announced plans for a new motorcycle show.

"I'm not a showman," said Mr. Zaldostanov, wearing a leather biker vest and a large medallion with the head of a wolf set in sparkly stones arranged to look like flames. "For me it's a war. This is a fight for the motherland." He accused the United States of "bombing the consciousness" of the world.

Among intellectuals, the mood is dark. In recent weeks, newspaper articles have attacked the journalism department at Moscow State University for teaching liberal ideas. Several professors at St. Petersburg State University have been fired for what their colleagues say are their liberal views.

Many are leaving. The number of Russians emigrating to Israel was up by about two-thirds in the first five months of this year, compared with the same period last year, according to Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics. Temporary teaching positions become permanent and graduate programs turn into extended stays.

"It's a very narrow circle but for those it touches, it is very painful," said Lyubov Borusyak, a sociologist at the Higher School of Economics, whose son, studying at Harvard, is an example of someone with no immediate plans to return. "It's like an icicle that is melting."

There are optimists. Vladimir Milov, an opposition politician, said Russians care far more about the economy than foreign politics, and that the aggressive and nationalistic language only goes skin deep.

"There's 5 to 10 percent of people who are really charged up with this imperialist rhetoric," he said. "But over 90 percent just don't care. Of course they watch TV, of course they get the messages, but this is all on the surface, like foam that can be washed away quickly."

On a recent Friday on Maroseyka Street, city workers were painting bike stands, set into the spacious new stone sidewalk. Ivan Ilin was walking back to work after having a bowl of onion soup at the Jean-Jacques cafe. Mr. Ilin, 33, from southern Russia, has a business in the new field of human resources.

"I love this discrimination against drivers," he declared brightly, gesturing at the narrowed road.

He usually travels to Europe twice a year, to Italy, Latvia and Lithuania, and to Lisbon to practice his Portuguese. He does not like the imagery of a Russia under siege, or the fact that the news media are not independent, but he feels there is little he can do to change it.

"I distance myself from it," he said.

Still, he has no plans to leave.

"Go to the U.S. and work in McDonald's?" he said. "No, I'm not going to do that. I want to stay where I'm needed."

Just off Old Arbat Street last week, a human rights activist who often serves as the country's conscience, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, 88, was sunk deeply into a dark blue couch. Her Moscow Helsinki Group has shrunk to seven employees, down from 17 in 2013. It stopped taking funding from outside Russia to avoid being labeled a foreign agent. On a recent radio call-in show, the first question put to her was from a man asking her view on "the predatory snarl of American imperialism."

She explained that America was far away and she was more interested in Russia, but he was implacable. There was a vote at the end. About 80 percent of the callers sided against her.

"What has surprised me and saddened me most was that after these 20 years of being connected to the world, of media, of freedoms, we still have not learned to think for ourselves," she said.

"I hope it will pass," she added, and pointed out that 20 percent had taken her side. "It can't go on like this forever."

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 #10
Moscow Times
August 10, 2015
Russian Opposition Cornered by Authorities in Regional Election Race
By Daria Litvinova

Attempts by the opposition's Democratic Coalition to take part in upcoming regional elections have been thwarted by local election commissions' refusal to register its members as candidates, in what analysts say is a concerted effort to nip opposition bids in the bud.

The coalition, which consists of opposition firebrand Alexei Navalny's Party of Progress, Parnas and several other parties, put forward candidates for upcoming elections in the regional parliaments of Novosibirsk, Kostroma, Magadan and Kaluga.

In order to be registered as a candidate, campaigners are required to gather the signatures of potential voters in their support and submit them to the election commissions.

In the Novosibirsk, Kostroma and Magadan regions, the election commissions refused to register the candidates on the basis that too many of their signatures were invalid, while in Kaluga, the coalition decided not to submit the collected signatures at all, saying that pro-Kremlin activists had infiltrated their campaign and deliberately forged 30 percent of the signatures, rendering their bid invalid.

The so-called signature filter proved effective as a tool for pushing undesirable candidates out of the race in 2014, when several well-known opposition politicians - such as Maria Gaidar, who has since moved to Ukraine to work for Odessa Governor and ex-Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and Olga Romanova, a prominent prisoners' rights advocate - were excluded from the race for the Moscow City Duma after election officials said that the numbers of valid signatures collected by the candidates were below the threshold.

Analysts say that election officials are blocking the opposition before the actual vote in an attempt to avoid situations such as the widespread falsifications during the 2011 State Duma elections that sparked large-scale protests in Moscow.

The mayoral elections of 2013 in which Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin was almost forced into a second round of voting after Navalny ran against him and launched an intensive grassroots campaign, and opposition candidates such as anti-drug campaigner Yevgeny Roizman and psychologist Galina Shirshina won in Yekaterinburg and Petrozavodsk appear to have cemented officials' determination to nip future opposition bids in the bud.

Novosibirsk: Hunger Strike

Election officials in Novosibirsk said that the opposition had not collected enough signatures after weeks of canvassing and rallying voters by the opposition. Arguing that they had ensured that there was nothing wrong with the signatures they collected, several opposition activists declared a hunger strike after the commission's rejection.

"Of the 17,500 signatures, the ... most exemplary ones were submitted to the election commission," Navalny wrote on his blog on July 17. "There is no legal reason to deny us the opportunity to participate in the elections," he said.

His longtime ally Leonid Volkov, a former Yekaterinburg municipal lawmaker who runs the coalition's campaign in Novosibirsk, explained that most signatures proclaimed invalid by the election commission reportedly failed to correspond to the database of the regional branch of the Federal Migration Service (FMS).

This database, Volkov said, was outdated and full of errors, but the authorities rejected all the explanations and evidence, claiming there was "no reason not to believe the FMS."

"We showed her [the FMS official] everything. ... We said: 'If you have information in your database that a person still owns a passport issued by the U.S.S.R., for example, and we have a more recent passport number in our signature list, isn't it your [FMS] error and not ours?' But she answered 'No, the FMS data is up to date and correct," Volkov wrote in his blog.

The coalition filed a complaint along with what they say is proof of their signatures' validity to the Central Election Commission in Moscow, which predictably decided against them on Friday.

Navalny, who attended the hearing, said the coalition didn't agree with the decision and would continue to fight for its right to be registered, his spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh wrote on Twitter.

Volkov announced via Twitter a rally for supporters scheduled to take place Tuesday. On Saturday he and his allies decided to end their hunger strike after one of the rejected candidates, Sergei Boiko, ended up in the intensive care unit of a local hospital, and Navalny called on his comrades to end the strike and look after their health.

Being denied registration is not the only trouble Navalny's allies have had to deal with in Novosibirsk. The local branch of the Investigative Committee has launched a case against the campaigners, accusing them of not paying one of the signature collectors.

According to Volkov, that collector was a pro-Kremlin mole who infiltrated their campaign in order to forge signatures and in doing so frame the coalition.

Magadan: Out for Revenge

Twenty-five out of 614 signatures in support of Georgy Alburov - an employee of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation and a candidate for the Magadan regional Duma - and two other potential candidates were also deemed invalid last month, leaving the coalition with an insufficient number of signatures to be registered for the election.

According to Alburov, the local election commission's graphologist found that 19 of them had been forged by signature collectors.

"Five of them were gathered by Vadim Syromyatnikov, our [candidate] number two, four of them I gathered myself, two of them were gathered by our campaign head Dmitry Krainev and one by local civil rights advocate and [candidate] number three [in our list] Zoya Leukhina," which means they can't be forged, Alburov wrote in his blog on July 31.

Another signature that was declared a forgery was provided by a local resident who signed the list in front of TV cameras, Alburov wrote.

"All other [measures to keep the opposition out of the race], such as fabricated criminal cases, censorship and lies on TV, attacks on campaign workers [that took place in late June], are no longer enough," Navalny wrote on his blog last week.

Campaigners in Magadan have also filed a complaint with the Central Election Commission and plan to take their case to court if necessary, Alburov said, adding that in the meantime, opposition activists plan to launch a campaign against local deputies from the ruling United Russia party.

"Every Magadan resident will know that the regional Duma consists of illegitimate hellish crooks who bought their mandates, and the attempts to elect at least one honest deputy there were undercut," Alburov wrote in his blog last week. "Life doesn't end with these elections," he added.

Kostroma and Kaluga: Infiltration

Ilya Yashin, an ally of slain opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and one of three candidates of the coalition in Kostroma, announced last week on his Facebook page that the local election committee had used the same tactics as in Novosibirsk and Magadan.

On Saturday, the regional election commission ruled to throw opposition candidates out of the race. Commission members rejected the coalition's arguments for the validity of rejected signatures, Volkov wrote on Twitter.

The Kostroma campaign head, Andrei Pivovarov, was arrested in late July and accused of attempting to steal personal data. According to Yashin, Pivovarov was set up by a police officer who allegedly gave the activist access to a police database and was subsequently arrested as his accomplice.

In Kaluga, the Democratic Coalition has for the first time given up on the idea of running the race on a party ticket.

Coalition member Vladimir Milov told Kommersant daily last month that the campaign had collected 6,300 signatures. Only 4,000 were needed to register the candidates, but 2,500 signatures turned out to have been forged by pro-Kremlin activists who infiltrated the campaign, leaving the coalition 200 signatures shy.

Nevertheless, Navalny and his allies refused to quit and said they would continue to support several candidates from single-member constituencies in the region.

The Easiest Way

The desire to bar opposition candidates from elections at the registration stage is easily explainable, according to Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst and head of the Mercator political research group.

"The Kremlin fears elections at all levels," he told The Moscow Times, commenting on the situation in Novosibirsk. "And the resources of [Vladimir] Churov [chair of the Central Election Commission who is accused by critics of manipulating election results for the ruling party] are not unlimited," Oreshkin said.

After the State Duma elections in 2011, the authorities made the decision to minimize ballot fraud during major elections, as it generates a major media backlash, so now they prefer to use another technique to get rid of the opposition: cutting it off at the registration stage, said Andrei Buzin, co-chair of the council of Golos, an independent election-monitoring watchdog.

In 2013 Navalny was allowed to participate in the mayoral election, but the authorities did not like the outcome - Navalny got more than 27 percent of the vote - at all, and will therefore keep the opposition out this year at all costs, Buzin said.

"It's quite difficult to falsify the results of a vote, and it constitutes a crime. To deny registration [on the basis of an insufficient number of signatures] is the easiest way," he told The Moscow Times on Friday in a phone interview.

According to Buzin, as long as the FMS database is used as evidence of the invalidity of the signatures, the Democratic Coalition has no chance of overturning the election commission's ruling.

"If they admit that the FMS references are incorrect, they will have to admit that they turned down a lot of candidates illegitimately, because they have used it so many times," he said.

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 #11
Main indicators of Russian banking system point to its stability - Nabiullina

MOSCOW. Aug 10 (Interfax) - The main figures from Russia's banking system show that it is stable and in a safe zone, Central Bank head Elvira Nabiullina said at a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"The situation in the banking sphere is a lot like a mirror of what is happening in the economy. Of course, outside factors can not help but play a factor in the development of the banking system. But as a whole, according to the main indicators which characterize it, it is in a safe zone, the banking system is stable," she said.

According to Nabiullina's assessment, the second quarter was even better for the banks than the first quarter. Q1 results show that the Russian banking sector made 51 billion rubles in profit. "This is of course not the 600 billion rubles we saw last year, or the trillion rubles from the year before last, but it is a positive moment. And we think that banking sector profit will be around 100 billion rubles annually," she said.

Capital, which grew 3% from January-June, and the profit allow banks to increase lending, Nabiullina said.

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 #12
Wall Street Journal
August 10, 2015
Russian Authorities Step in to Avert Ruble Slide
Kremlin and the central bank dismiss concerns about the battered currency
By Andrey Ostroukh

MOSCOW-Russian authorities sought to dismiss concerns about the battered ruble as they claimed on Monday that they have control over the currency market.

Following the ruble's swift depreciation over the past four weeks, the Kremlin and the central bank have stepped in with verbal interventions, in what appeared to be an attempt to limit the ruble's slide.

"The central bank is doing a lot to make the national currency stronger, at least, to make it steady as our financial system in general," Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with the central bank Chairwoman Elvira Nabiullina

Ms. Nabiullina reiterated that Russia's banking system was safe and sound.

The ruble showed little reaction to the comments, losing 0.5% on the day to 64.34 versus the dollar as of 1137 GMT, close to its weakest levels since mid-February seen last week. The market expects the ruble to drop further later this year because of stronger demand for dollars and euros needed to pay back foreign debt.

The central bank tried to assure the market that a rapid drop in the ruble looked unlikely, even though banks and companies will have to increase payments on their foreign debt by the end of the year.

"The Bank of Russia does not forecast excessive demand [for dollars and euros] on the currency market due to the upcoming foreign debt repayment," it said in a statement.

Russian banks and companies, which are cut off from global capital markets by Western sanctions, will have to pay back $61 billion in the last four months of the year, according to the debt repayment schedule.

But the central bank said that in fact Russian lenders and non-financial institutions will have to reimburse only up to $35 billion by the end of the year. A substantial part of these payments will be carried out within company groups, meaning that Russia-based offices will transfer money to its branches abroad.

According to the central bank, Russian banks and companies hold foreign assets worth $135 billion. Through its balance of payments, Russia will receive another $28 billion by the end of the year should oil prices average $60 per barrel. If oil prices stay close to $40 per barrel, Russia will receive around $20 billion, the central bank said.

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 #13
Putin: Russia's would-be rating agency should be really independent

MOSCOW, August 10. /TASS/. Russia's would-be rating agency should be really independent and enjoy confidence of all market players, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday.

"It should be a really independent agency, which would enjoy confidence of all market participants," Putin said at a meeting with Russian Central Bank governor Elvira Nabiullina.

The president said such an agency would be highly expedient, since the United States-controlled international rating agency were too biased. "I remember our discussion with the former leaders of the European Commission when they expressed indignation at the actions of our American partners, saying that many assessments given by international, but in fact American, rating agencies are not objective," Putin said. "I remember only too well their indignation at such state of things. And back then, they said they would establish their own, additional, independent agencies. Russia must look at that too."

National agency may begin to assign ratings by mid-2016

Elvira Nabiullina noted that Russia's yet-to-be created National Rating Agency may issue its first rankings by the middle of 2016.

The president asked when the agency might be up and running.

"Market participants are going to establish this agency by the end of this year, but the first ratings may begin to be assigned actively some day in the middle of next year," Nabiullina said.

"Professionals of the highest qualification will be invited. The operation of the rating agency will be absolutely transparent and based on the best international practices from the standpoint of methodology, etc. We are hoping that investors will have confidence in that rating agency. For our purposes (of regulation and supervision and for refinancing) we will be using the assessments of that rating agency made on the national scale," Nabiullina said.
She pointed out that "it will be a project of market participants."

"The Bank of Russia will not participate in it with its money. We will merely arrange for that project. It will rest upon the principles that will enjoy credibility with investors," Nabiullina said, adding it would be essential to achieve investor confidence and transparent operation of that agency, which should be rather strong.

"If we fail to cope with this task, the agency's creation will make no sense," Putin said.

Nabiullina said that each participant in the project would have a share less than five percent. "There should be the certainty no big player will be able to determine the operation of the rating agency on one's own and the agency will remain open to many investors. The participant's lowest membership fee will be 50 million rubles, and the initial start-up capital, 3 billion rubles.

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 #14
Reuters
August 10, 2015
Russia's Gazprom Defies Expectations With Profit Growth Despite Sanctions

Russia's largest gas producer Gazprom beat expectations with a 71 percent jump in first-quarter net profit after weakness in the ruble more than compensated for a drop in sales volumes to Europe.

Gazprom's prices for gas sold to Europe are linked to the price of oil, but a time lag of several months means that its sales in the three months to March 31 were at prices pegged to oil at almost twice its January level of around $50 a barrel.

Though Western sanctions in response to Russia's actions in the Ukraine resulted in a 16 percent drop in Gazprom's European sales volumes, export revenue was up 12 percent at 543 billion rubles ($8.42 billion).

With the ruble having lost about half its value since last year, that served to lift group profit to 382.1 billion rubles against 223 billion rubles in the same period last year and a consensus analysts' forecast of 348 billion rubles.

Analysts polled by Reuters said that the first-quarter results are likely to be Gazprom's strongest for the year, with prices continuing to fall in line with weak oil prices.

Sanctions also look set to continue to take their toll. On Friday the United States added Gazprom's Yuzhno-Kirinskoye oil and gas field to its sanctions list against the Russian energy sector.

Yuzhno-Kirinskoye was seen as key to expansion of the Gazprom-led Sakhalin-2 LNG plant, co-developed with Royal Dutch Shell, Japan Mitsui and Mitsubishi Corp.

Gazprom also said on Monday that it borrowed $760 million and 240 million euros ($263.1 million) from Sberbank last month, plus a further $310 million from Gazprombank, without elaborating on the purpose of the loans.

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 #15
Moscow Times/Vedomosti
August 10, 2015
Russia's War on Food May Be Step Too Far
By Nikolai Epple
Nikolai Epple is a columnist at Vedomosti. This comment originally appeared in Vedomosti.

Russian authorities are carrying out this destruction of food as if it was a completely ordinary police measure. But this is no ordinary measure. This is demonstrative barbarity, an insult to society, and a refusal to see the most important ethical side of the issue.

This measure was proposed by the Agriculture Ministry at the end of July. President Vladimir Putin signed a corresponding decree on July 29.

Russia's agricultural watchdog, Rosselkhoznadzor, announced the elimination of its first batch of banned goods shortly afterward - several hundred tons worth - while emphasizing that these were as yet "small amounts." What's behind this demonstrative war on food?

One theory, that the measures are intended to further mobilize the public by bolstering a siege mentality, is not very sound, says Alexei Levinson of independent pollster the Levada Center. There isn't any need at the moment for additional mobilization, as the public still has faith in the country's leadership.

At the same time, this order is pushing some pretty hot buttons, and the main audience is actually those segments of the population loyal to the government, who are already feeling the effects of rising food prices.

It seems we are looking at a combination of factors leading to outcomes unforeseen by the authorities behind these plans.

On the one hand, the destruction of foodstuffs is often entirely justified, and is, moreover, established practice in Russia and abroad. This relates primarily to expired foods or those not meeting sanitary standards.

Contraband food products on the market also create problems at every stage; it's unclear, for example, who would be responsible if these goods were found to be lacking in quality.

There are many violations of the embargo. According to Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich, there are about 700-800 open cases related to such violations, which is why all participants in the process - exporters, suppliers and customs agents - need a demonstration of severity from the state.

But one of the downsides of fomenting public hysteria is that it's difficult to pull the brakes on that PR train once it leaves the station. It is unacceptable to criticize the president.

Those carrying out his orders want to show their full support, and interested parties just want to ride the trend (the CEO of incinerator producer Turmalin, for example, has announced delivery of 20 mobile incinerators to border checkpoints, with only 400 remaining points left to equip), leading to further escalation.

The habitual public campaign in support of a government order has, in this case, run into a situation clearly perceived by many as absurd: a demonstrative war on food against the backdrop of an economic crisis.

The Presidential Council on Civil Society and Human Rights and priests from the Russian Orthodox Church have spoken out against this practice, and a petition on Change.org demanding that the decree be repealed and banned food given to the needy collected over 100,000 signatures in a single day (by 8 p.m. the next day that figure was 220,000).

Anatoly Aksakov, chair of the State Duma committee on economic policy, voiced his support for the idea, and the president's spokesman Dmitry Peskov promised to inform Putin about the petition.

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 #16
Sputnik
August 10, 2015
Why Russia is Not Rising Up Against the Destruction of Parmesan

"We will bury you!" could be the chant of officials destroying seized sanctioned foods, but the reaction in Russia has been more one of concerns for efficiency.

The Russian agricultural watchdog's decision to destroy sanctioned foodstuffs was met with a mixed reaction as the country continues transitioning to a consumer society.

While in Western media, the decision to destroy food has been covered from the perspective of public outrage, the reaction in Russia has been considerably more mixed. In a country where 90 percent never tried jamon serrano, arguably the most famous sanctioned product because of its association with the high wealth of its consumers, the biggest issue has become one of efficiency.

"Instead of simply burning and burying, special grounds [in Europe] use composting, methane and anaerobic brewing, as well as burning in special incinerators which allow for the use of energy created by the waste burning to generate energy for domestic use," dean of Saint Petersburg's European University Maksim Buyev wrote in a column in Vedomosti.

Russia's liberal opposition has also marked its opposition to the sanctions in a view best highlighted by Masha Gessen, in a July column in the New York Times. Some commentators have even claimed that the food ban is a personal attack against their lifestyle.

"Some Russians miss their Australian rib-eye, others their Norwegian salmon, still others their Italian pasta, but it's cheese that most yearn for. Its absence from the dinner table is a singular symbol of the new time - the time of Russia's war with the West," Gessen wrote.

Efficiency and Corruption

The issue of destroying food could also be linked to the inability to rein in corruption at Russian customs offices, according to Tatiana Stanovaya, head of the analytical department of the Center for Political Technologies, writing for Carnegie Moscow Center. The issue was investigated by the Russian edition of Forbes, which found that "For 300,000 rubles (around $5,000) in around two hours, Polish apples will become for you Serbian, or Argentinian, or Israeli."

"The difference between yesterday and today is that customs officials need to not get a bribe from you, but to burn your product. Therefore as much as possible needs to be burned to demonstrate efficiency to the higher-ups," Stanovaya wrote.

It is also not clear how the proposal of giving away seized foodstuffs to the poor could be carried out transparently, according to Russia's agriculture minister Aleksandr Tkachev.

"If these products are distributed through unclear decisions, where is the guarantee that there won't be corruption or abuse of power," Tkachev said.

Russia's Food System

In addition to Russia's agriculture, which has arguably begun rebounding as a result of the sanctions, substantial numbers of Russians use personal plots of land for growing their own food both in addition to or even instead of commercial food sources. According to an opinion poll published in May by the Public Opinion Foundation, 51 percent of Russia's urban dwellers have dachas, suburban estates with an adjacent plot of land.

While dachas are overwhelmingly used for recreation, nearly half the owners also use them to grow their own food, with 27 percent using the food grown as a substantial addition to food purchased in stores and for 7 percent it is a primary source of food.

As a result, Russian consumers do have a closer relationship with food than their counterparts in Europe, where farmers often burn foodstuffs in protest, while Russia has no similar experience.

"Modern industrialized society treats food, to say directly, as devil-may-care. And the wealthier it is, the more food it throws away. And no one really bothers with the issues of African or their own poor and starving," Russian political analyst Georgiy Bovt wrote in a column for Gazeta.ru.

According to Bovt, the destruction of sanctioned foods are also not likely to impact most Russians, as they were primarily consumed by "the affluent part of the population of Moscow, [Saint] Petersburg, and also, possibly, several large cities."

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#17
Moscow Times
August 10, 2015
Western Experts Cry Foul Over Russian Books Published in Their Names
By Howard Amos

Prominent Western experts and journalists accused a Russian publishing house Sunday of pirating their work and printing books using their names without their permission or prior knowledge.

Journalists Luke Harding and Edward Lucas and U.S.-based Russia expert Donald Jensen confirmed to The Moscow Times that they did not know anything about Russian-language books allegedly written by them and produced by Moscow publishing house Algoritm.

"Absolutely no idea about this book. I have not given permission of any kind," Lucas, the author of several books about Russia, said in written comments when asked whether he had penned "How the West Lost to Putin," a book published last year by Algoritm. "It is clearly a breach of copyright," he added.

All the books in question appear in Algoritm's Project Putin series, which comprises over 20 different titles examining various aspects of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his political views.

While Russia has strict domestic copyright laws, the country is known for piracy of international music, film and book content. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative placed Russia on its priority watch list in its annual report on the world's worst copyright violators, called the Special 301 Report, issued in April.

Jensen said he was not aware of Algoritm's "Putin and the U.S.A.," printed earlier this year under his name and available to buy in Moscow bookstores, until contacted by The Moscow Times on Sunday.

"Wow, I have not written such a book in any language, it looks to be a compendium of my [U.S. federal news service] Voice of America commentaries (with an inaccurate summary)," Jensen, a fellow at the Washington-based Center for Transatlantic Relations think tank, said by e-mail.

The director of the Algoritm publishing house, Sergei Nikolayev, admitted by telephone Sunday that prior permission was not sought from Harding, a journalist at Britain's The Guardian newspaper, to use his writings in a 2015 book called "Nobody Except Putin."

"If he [Harding] surfaces then we will come to some agreement and pay him a fee," said Nikolayev.

He declined to comment on Lucas or Jensen's claims, saying he was not familiar with their cases and had been off work for several days.

Harding said in written comments that his publisher, Guardian Faber, will decide whether to take legal action against Algoritm once they have had time to investigate.

"The first I heard about it was a couple of weeks ago when a Russian friend said he'd spotted my 'book' in a Moscow bookstore ... normally publishers buy rights, translate, then put out an edition," said Harding.

On its website, Algoritm describes the book under Harding's name as "developing the idea" of "Mafia State" (the name of Harding's authorized book) - a position that, it said, "is symptomatic of certain circles of British politicians, journalists and public figures."

Other titles in the same Algoritm collection include those apparently authored by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, murdered Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and Russian political scientists Stanislav Belkovsky, Andrei Piontkovsky and Vladimir Pribylovsky.

Piontkovsky said Sunday that he had given permission for his writings to be published in three separate volumes for Algoritm and praised the publishing house's series on Putin. "It's a good series and they have put out a lot of good books," he said by telephone.

Algoritm, founded in 1996, describes itself on its website as one of Russia's leading publishers specializing in controversial political and social content. It has printed works by a number of senior Russian officials including Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin and nationalist firebrand Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

Moscow-based U.S. journalist Michael Bohm also alleged that a book titled "President Putin's Mistake" published under his name was issued without his knowledge.

"There was no agreement," he said by telephone Sunday.

Bohm, a former Moscow Times editor, said that he was contacted by Algoritm in April about a possible collaboration, but discussions fizzled out without anything being signed.

The material in the book is taken from his interviews and articles, Bohm said, including articles originally published in English.

"When you translate someone's work, there's always the risk of translation and mistranslation ... there are mistakes in there," Bohm said, adding that Algoritm had not responded to an enquiry when he discovered the book last month.

Algoritm head Nikolayev said in an interview with radio station Ekho Moskvy on Sunday that the publishing house had held talks with Bohm.

"I think that we will sign an agreement and everything will be fine," Nikolayev said
 

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 #18
Rossiyskaya Gazeta
July 28, 2015
Russian analyst plays down US, Russian mutual threats
Article by political analyst Leonid Radzikhovskiy: "As If"

Recently top Russian and US (NATO) officials have been exchanging rejoinders like thunderbolts.

Russia says that the aim of American policy is "regime change" - in effect a pro-Western revolution (coup) in the Russian Federation.

The United States says that Russia presents "the main threat to the national security" of the United States.

Of course, the sides know not only how to step on the gas but also how to put the brakes on. They are also reiterating their statements about "partnership" and sometimes disavowing excessively intransigent utterances (thus Obama gave a gentle rap over the knuckles to the general who "had seen a Russian threat"). But it is clear that public sentiments in both countries (and indeed in the EU) are such that they are expressed not by diplomatic courtesies but by statements of mutual threats.

Finally, there is talk from the most diverse quarters of the possibility of a Big War without, it is true, specifying by whom, against whom, and what for. But "there are speeches, their meaning obscure or trifling, yet they cannot be heard without agitation" [quotation from untitled Lermontov poem].

Sowing panic among others and yourselves is easy, fear has big eyes, but there is a simple antidote. If you ask: OK, who is this person who could, with what forces and most importantly WHY, fight whom? your fears fly away like devils at cockcrow.

In actual fact the arguments cited thousands of times over the past 70 years for the IMPOSSIBILITY of a war between nuclear powers are still there. And mutually assured destruction and as a minimum the mutual infliction of unacceptable damage on each other and so forth - all this is as powerful as ever. No ideological, prestige-based, geopolitical, or economic considerations - nothing is worth reducing yourself and others to radioactive dust.

In actual fact, "fearing War" (or the threats of nuclear war) is, rather, "a thrill." It invigorates us. In their hearts everyone understands that however much you may seek to frighten yourself and others, these are all nothing more than mind games. That is WHY we like them - they look "kick-ass," but in actual fact you know they are safe. True, the games are quite harmful - not because they could become "self-fulfilling prophesies" and really provoke Armageddon, but simply because they divert us from real problems to thought-up ones. "As long as there is no war" - but there won't be war, there won't... Are there no OTHER concerns in life?

But does talk about "threats" and political plans seem more considered?

The events in Ukraine, the sanctions, the countersanctions, exclusion from the G8, the efforts of Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO - these are reality, not "windmills," not "bogeys."

Does the United States (NATO) indeed have an aim - overthrowing Putin and dismantling the existing political System? Some people may be dreaming about this, it is true, but many people in the West certainly do not want it - they fear chaos in a nuclear country with the fall of the Power Vertical and on the other hand they know that the pro-Western forces in the Russian Federation are far weaker even than the pro-Russian forces in the EU, so that with Putin's departure a fiercer anti-Western leader could come to power.

But the main thing is certainly not the West's wish, but opportunity. However much you may joke about "cookies" [reference to US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland handing out cookies to Ukrainian protesters], you cannot deny the main point. Murders or palace coups are carried out to order. But there are no revolutions to order. Just as there are no "peoples to order" or "elites to order." For a revolution there must as a minimum be active mass dissatisfaction at "grassroots" level ("they don't want to live the old way") and a confused ferment and/or plots among the "upper strata" ("they can't exercise control the old way").

So. In Russia today, with a popularity rating close to 90 per cent for Putin, with the security and economic elites firmly tied to the Power Vertical - there cannot be any question of any potential preconditions for revolution.

Moreover, we can regard it as a reliable sociological fact that the sanctions are working to ensure that the "fortress under siege" mentality dominates in the public consciousness and thus merely "emotionally cements" the Power Vertical "to spite our enemies" Western experts and politicians are very familiar with this phenomenon - and it does not bother them. The point is that the aim of Western pressure is not to "overthrow the regime" but simply to restrict Russia's "room for manoeuvre." Including in Ukraine. But on the other hand ,for Russia itself it is also desirable that some kind of stabilization should come to Ukraine. The conflict's aggravation is in no one's interests. If it is unclear how to emerge from the situation so that all interested parties save face, then it is certain that no one needs to break more pots when the bill for them is submitted immediately. One way or the other, the "commotion" in Ukraine does really seem to have ended and the situation has moved to the frozen conflict stage, which today is "the resultant of all evils."

But if the West is unable to effect "regime change" in Russia, Russia is still less able to do anything of the kind to the United States and EU. And is clearly not setting aims of this kind.

How is Russia "threatening the national security" of the United States? A military conflict is ruled out. True, alone in the world the Russian Federation has a nuclear missile potential comparable to the United States - but that is not a threat of aggression, but good old Mutual Deterrence. Russia does not support international terrorists (ISIL, Al-Qa'idah) - no one has ever made accusations of that kind. Nor is Russia conducting "subversive activity" in the United States. So what THREAT are we talking about?

OK, but how then are we to treat politicians' declarations? It's just business - nothing personal. Politicians sometimes "present a word picture" AS THOUGH it were a question of "the final struggle." They take a credit of trust from society with these words as security.

In actual fact the United States and its allies want to restrain Russia and Russia wants to restrict them and expand its own influence at least in the CIS. Geopolitical arm wrestling? Yes. A fateful battle to destroy the Systems? Certainly not. Each country's main problems lie not in external threats but INSIDE itself.

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 #19
www.rt.com
August 10, 2015
Duma chief blames US for instigating global instability through intrigue

The Russian Lower House speaker has warned of Washington's plans of global domination through sowing chaos, and said that the US would continue to provoke anti-Russian sentiments in Europe through lies and propaganda.

In an article 'August of Provocations' published in the government daily Rossiiskaya Gazeta on Monday, Sergey Naryshkin writes that the clear anti-Russian course of the US administration, intensified in late July, will become even more acute in the near future.

The Duma speaker maintains the cause is America's enormous external debt and that its government has designs on impoverishing other nations, including Russia, to alleviate this burden.

"Today, as the situation is strained across the world, we should closely watch any political intrigue prepared on both sides of the Atlantic. It is important to see and analyze anything that is created in the West and offered to various international organizations," Naryshkin wrote.

The most vivid example of such intrigue was the recent voting in the UN Security Council on an unprecedented and extremely politicized subject - the international tribunal into the Malaysian Boeing disaster in Ukraine, according to the politician's article. Naryshkin adds that the Russia veto on this initiative was inevitable just as was the veto on the resolution on Crimea in March 2014. "Do you think anyone seriously expected a different outcome?" he asks.

The top Russian parliamentarian noted that he had no doubt the United States would not stop at this. Washington will keep imposing this discussion on the international community and it will present any decision on any level as something that licenses its intervention.

Speaking on the ultimate objective of Washington's policies, Naryshkin noted it remains the same: "Their external debt is enormous and looting foreign states is a method they are used to." He added that they use the same leverages as before, which in his view are no longer working, such as issuing more US dollars, maintaining total control over NATO and illegal eavesdropping of European leaders. However, America's elite still intend to keep the US Dollar as the main international currency and lay their hands on other nations' natural resources.

The Duma chief also warned that Washington "would continue to zombify people with their lying, present their wishes as facts and create new motives for anti-Russian sentiments in Europe."

At the end of the article, Naryshkin calls upon his readers to brace themselves for a forthcoming and deeper crisis in international relations, but he expresses confidence that Washington's future provocations will fail. "As for the international tribunal, it will take place once and for a completely different reason than today's backers want it to be. And we will all live to witness that."

Last week, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with the Singapore-based Channel News Asiathat that the ongoing investigation into the MH17 Malaysia Airlines plane crash in eastern Ukraine was "not independent, not comprehensive and not truly international."

Lavrov was adamant in saying that Russia wants "the truth to be established and the culprits to be brought to justice." However, the Russian foreign minister admits he is becoming frustrated as the investigation was "not independent, was not comprehensive and not truly international. All our attempts to push the investigation, to make it transparent, to provide information... all our attempts to get answers to the questions which we formulated through our professional civil aviation agency, all these were just stonewalled," he said.

In late July, Russia vetoed a draft of a UN Security Council resolution calling for an international tribunal on the MH17 crash, classifying the plane's downing as a threat to peace and security. Despite this motion, Moscow is ready to assist the investigation into what caused the downing of the Malaysian Boeing 777, Russian UN envoy Vitaly Churkin told the international body.

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 #20
Russia Insider/Vineyard of the Saker
www.russia-insider.com
August 9, 2015
Complete Media Fail in Blaming Russia for Last Year's US Bank Hacks
The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, the Daily Telegraph - they all piled on, trumpeting the news fed to them by the FBI and NSA that the Russians were behind it - suggesting it was a pseudo military attack in connection to war tensions over Ukraine
Now the perpetrators have been caught.  Turns out they have no connection to Russia
Being a mainstream journalist means never having to apologize
JiminNH(The Vineyard of the Saker)

This article originally appeared at The Vineyard of the Saker

It has become a common occurrence for the western ruling elites, and their propaganda ministries of the mainstream media euphemistically called the "free press", to immediately blame Russia for a litany of perceived misconduct, whether there are grounds for such allegations or not.

Often such baseless allegations are conflated with other events in the western narrative to give the allegations an aura of credibility and convince the western public of the nefarious threats to western civilization caused by "a resurgent Russia."

Readers of this blog need no reminder of the list of such false allegations, of which the MH-17 attack is among the more blatant.

What is also a common occurrence is that when the initial allegation of alleged Russian "misconduct" or "aggressiveness" is proven to be wholly without merit, the reporting on the incident frequently not only fails to correct the record or retract the initial allegations, it most often reports on the real findings of the incident without even mentioning that Russia was initially, and incorrectly, blamed for the event.

A loyal reader of this blog has pointed out one such recent event, and has co-authored this post at my request to help set the record straight in regards to a widely reported cyber attack of western banks last year that was falsely blamed on Russia, as the light of truth needs to be shone whenever possible on the dark side of the false Western narrative.

In August, 2014, it was widely reported that the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had opened an investigation into allegations that a massive data hack of five major western banks, most significantly JPMorgan Chase & Co., was the work of Russian hackers intent on exacting revenge on the West for the imposition of sanctions on Russia. In the hacks, data on upwards of 83 million of the banks customers were breached.

For example, an article published by the media titan Wall Street Bloomberg Business, with the headline "FBI Said to Examine Whether Russia Tied to JPMorgan Hack", opened the report by declaring:

"Russian hackers attacked the U.S. financial system in mid-August, infiltrating and stealing data form JPMorgan Chase & Co. and at least one other bank, an incident the FBI is investigating as a possible retaliation for government sponsored sanctions." The article stated "Attacks on the U.S. financial sector from Russia and Eastern Europe have jumped over that last several months, according to several cyber security experts. Companies and U.S. officials are examining the possibility that the uptick is related to the conflict over Russia's behavior in Ukraine", stating that "The incidents occurred at a low point in relations between Russia and the West. Russian troops continue to mass on the Ukrainian border and the West tightens sanctions aimed at crippling Russian companies, including some of the country's most important banks."

The article declared that "The sophistication of the attack and technical indicators extracted from the bank computers provide some evident of a government link" while acknowledging that the attack may simply be a criminal, not state sponsored, breach. The report is given additional significance by mentioned that the National Security Agency was aiding the investigation. Further plausibility was offered for the attack being blamed on Russia; JPMorgan was reported "singled out for criticism when it blocked a payment from the Russian embassy to the affiliate of a U.S. sanctioned bank" wherein "Russia's foreign ministry called the move by New York-based JPMorgan "illegal and absurd." The article quoted security consultant who boldly declared that "Russia has a policy of reactionary attacks in relation to political contexts."

(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-08-27/fbi-said-to-be-probing-whether-russia-tied-to-jpmorgan-hacking)

Likewise, Britain's Telegraph headlined an article on the hack as "FBI Investigates alleged Russian cyber attack on Wall Street," stating that "The FBI is investigating whether Russian hackers staged a cyber-attack on major Wall Street businesses this month in retaliation for US sanctions imposed over Ukraine", citing the Bloomberg report. It went on to say "There has been a rise in the number of cyber attacks on US financial institutions this year from Russia and eastern Europe as relations have deteriorated between Washington and Moscow during the Ukraine Crisis."

As did Bloomberg, the Telegraph report asserted that

"The sophistication of the attacks appeared to be beyond the capability of normal criminal hackers" which "fueled suspicion that the operations may have been launched in retaliation for the US imposition of tougher sanctions on Russian banks and companies for Moscow's aggression over Ukraine."
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnes/northamerica/usa/11060339/FBI-investigates-alleged-Russian-cyber-attack-on-Wall-street.html)

As part of the propaganda barrage, the authoritative Janes360, a defense and intelligence service, published an article on August 27, 2014 entitled "Sanctions on Russia will increase risk of cyber attacks against Western companies and critical infrastructure" in which its bulleted "Key Points" declared that "Increased Western sanctions against Russia suggest that retaliatory cyber attacks are more likely." The article referred to the JPMorgan Chase hack, and reported that "the attacks were the work of Russian hackers, as the level of sophistication was too high for normal criminals, suggesting state sponsorship. As well as state and financial assets, critical national infrastructure (CNI) and large companies considered to be "symbolically Western" are likely to be within the target set for any potential state-sponsored cyber attacks." The article then went on to air a laundry list of alleged Russian cyber attacks against western institutions.

More importantly, Janes used the alleged JPMorgan cyber attack to remind its audience that the US Congress "has continually failed to pass cyber security legislation, hindering the ability to counter cyber threats." It reminder the reader of warnings by Richard Clarke and former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta "of Russian retaliatory cyber attacks in April, 2013 as a natural counter to Western economic sanctions" with Panetta calling cyber attacks the "battleground of the future" and said that Russia is second only to the US in cyber capabilities." Janes forecast that although hundreds of millions of dollars/pounds were budgeted by western powers to develop national cyber security strategies, the author feared that "any government measures are likely to be restricted by budgetary constraints," a not so subtle call for even more Western defense spending to ward off the evil cyber forces of the East.

(http://www.janes.com/articles/4245/sanctions-on-russia-will-increase-risk-of-cyber-attacks-against-western-companies-and-critical-infrastructure)

Needless to say, many other western media outlets dutifully repeated the allegations, adding them to the war hysteria that existed during the height of the war in the Donbass last August, where Novorossiyan armed forces were in the midst of their successful counter-offensive that saw them close the Ilovaisk cauldron, liberate Novoazovsk and move on Mariupol, while threatening to break out and attack north towards Severodonetsk, Starya Krasnnyanka and Artemovsk. The Minsk I accords were signed on Sept. 5th, just one week after this spate of reports of alleged Russian responsibility for the JPMorgan hacks.

Flash forward a year, and you will find reports that emerged on July 21, 2015 that four people were arrested for the JPMorgan and other bank cyber attacks of August, 2014, with a fifth suspect remaining at large. Unsurprisingly, those arrested were not "Russian state sponsored hackers." Also unsurprisingly, very few of the reports included any reporting that informed the reader that the JPMorgan hack was initially, and incorrectly, blamed on Russia.

The MSM reports detailed how the four suspects, two Israeli citizens as well as US citizens Joshua Aaron and Anthony Murgio, were charged with using the hacked data in a "complex securities fraud scheme", as reported by Fortune, where the data was used for a "pump-and-dump" stock fraud, using bulk emails and pre-planned trading to pump up the targeted stocks for their own personal benefit. USA Today, among others, reported that the scheme also included an "illegal bitcoin operation."

Perusing the reporting of the titans of western MSM, from Bloomberg to Fortune to Reuters to USA Today to CNBC, it is difficult to find any reporting on the arrest that point out that blame for the subject cyber attacks was initially placed upon a "resurgent" Russia. Apparently most of the western presstitutes, as our friend Paul Craig Roberts calls the Western "free press," did not find it fit to print that the cyber attacks were premised upon no motive greater than the foundational virtue of Western capitalism, namely greed.

A specific search for any reporting of the arrest by the "respected defense publisher" Janes360 found zero results. Presumably minor criminal arrests for fraud are outside the scope of reporting by a major mouthpiece of the military industrial complex.

In direct contrast to the reports of "sophistication" of the alleged Russian cyber attack, the august titan of the financial media industry Bloomberg, whose "Russia did it" headlines screamed so loudly in August 2014, meekly reported that "Digital Misfits Link JPMorgan Hack to Pump-and-Dump Fraud." While reporting that "JPMorgan officials argued initially that one of the largest J.S. bank hacks in history was the work of the Russian government," the report failed to provide any details of the initial assertion that the hack was Russian "retaliation" for Western sanctions related to the Ukraine coup. The article did note that the JPMorgan chief information security officer was reassigned "amid discord over his handling of the breach", wherein the ISO and his boss, a former head of the US Air Forces cyber combat unit, "were the chief advocates of the theory that the Russian government was involved in the breach."

(http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-07-21/fbi-israel-make-securities-fraud-arrests-tied-to-jpmorgan-hack)

Among those outlets that maintained some semblance of journalistic integrity was the Washington Post, which wrote that "The charging documents make no mention of the intrusion into JPMorgan, which garnered front-page headlines last year for the theft of data belonging to 76 million households. Bloomberg Business reported that the breach was the work of Russian hackers, possibly sponsored by the Russian government in retaliation for Western sanctions over its behavior in Ukraine. Instead, the people allegedly behind the hack have nothing to do with the Russian government or Russian crime rings, said a second individual."

( https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-israel-make-arrests-in-schemes-thought-to-be-tied-to-jpmorgan-hack/2015/07/21/321ebcaa-2fd7-11e5-97ae-30a30cca95d7_story.html )

The NY Times also found the link fit to print, albeit buried near the end of the column, that "The attack on JPMorgan garnered major headlines and attention last year because of the number of people affected and a theory that it may have been tied to Russian gangs, with possible ties to the Russian government. Federal authorities, however, quickly ruled out the Russian government as a suspect, as well as the possibility of direct ties to Russian gangs." Apparently being genetically incapable of completely exonerating the evil Russians though, the Times reported that "The court filings on Tuesday, however, suggest some loose connection to Russia."

( http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/22/business/dealbook/4-arrested-in-schemes-said-to-be-tied-to-jpmorgan-chase-breach.html )

Finally, Reuters did the same, with the second to last sentence of the article informing the reader that "The JPMorgan attack initially prompted speculation that Russian hackers were involved, but U.S. investigators ruled out Moscow early in the case." No mention of linkage of the alleged Russian state involvement to the Ukraine or Crimean sanctions regimes was made.

(http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/21/us-jpmorgan-fraud-idUSKCN0PV24L20150721)

It is interesting to contrast the reporting of the initial allegations versus the actual arrests in the trade publication arstechnica.com. ARS also dutifully propagandized the initial Bloomberg report, and the "sophistication" of the cyber attack. That same website reported on the actual arrests for the cyber attack on JPMorgan, without mentioning once its lengthy, but faulty, initial report.

(Compare http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/08/jpmorgan-other-banks-hacked-and-fbi-looks-to- russia-for-culprits/ with http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/4-men-reportedly-arrested-in-relation-to-jpmorgan-chase-hack/ )

This incident aptly demonstrates how the ruling elites of the AZ empire frame the false Western narrative of Russian "misconduct," vociferously asserting baseless and unsubstantiated allegations of Russian responsibility for wrongful acts without the slightest hesitation even before an investigation is undertaken, while meekly and mildly, if at all, reporting on the results of the actual investigation that demonstrate the false nature of those boisterous initial allegations.

This incident is obviously not the first such example of the clear disconnect between factual events and the false Western narrative directed against the target of Western ire, and the despicable charade of the more than one-year long investigation of the MH-17 tragedy will likely not be the last in a long string of initial bombastic propaganda directed against Russia and the others members of the resistance to the AZ empire being proven false. Such incidents, however, should not escape examination of those who seek the truth, and need to be highlighted whenever they occur.

JiminNH is a USAF veteran who resides in NH.  The motto "Live Free or Die" on the license plate should not be just a quaint historical relic of a once great constitutional republic.

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 #21
Defensenews.com
August 9, 2015
Analyst: Russian Industry Faces Challenges Unique to 'Putin's Russia'
An Interview With Ruslan Pukhov, Director of CAST
By Matthew Bodner

MOSCOW - The fall of the Soviet Union rocked Russia's inherited defense industry to the core. With a government no longer able to bankroll massive procurements, defense industry enterprises were forced to transform into export-oriented businesses or die. This pivot has over the last two decades turned post-Soviet Russia into the world's second largest arms exporter, only steps behind the United States. In 2014, Russian exports hit new highs at $13.2 billion according to state arms export agency Rosobornexport. Meanwhile, the government since 2011 has been investing an unprecedented 20 trillion rubles (about US $350 billion at recent exchange rates) into defense procurements and industry modernization. The program is set to wrap up in 2020.

Ruslan Pukhov's privately owned think tank, the Center for the Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, has become a leading source of analysis on the Russian defense industry and military issues. As CAST's director, he is a prominent Russian observer of the evolution of the country's defense industry over the past 20 years. Pukhov  is a member of the Russian Defense Ministry's Public Advisory Board.

Q. What do you think Russia's industry has to offer that others don't? Why buy Russian weapons?

A. The Russian defense industry is very close morally, physically and spiritually  to the Russian way of waging war. The Russian armed forces, beginning with those founded by the first duke of Russia, Ivan  III - grandfather to Ivan the Terrible - adhere to one basic observation attributed to German Chancellor Bismarck: Russia is never as strong as it looks, and Russia is never as weak as it looks.

Russia is strong but not almighty, and there are recent events that show this - such as the downing of nine aircraft since the beginning of June and the collapse of a barracks that killed over 20 soldiers. In some things, Russia does quite well and is quite developed, and the same goes for Russian technology. I used to joke with a professor I studied with at Case Western University, Stanton Court, that US fighter aircraft look like Swiss watches, but Russian fighters look like tanks. Would you prefer to fight with a tank or a Swiss watch? This is a joke, but there is some rationale to it. Russian equipment, be it indigenous or adopted form the West, is made in a way that less sophisticated machines could build them and less skilled and educated people could operate them.

We always joked that certain Western equipment is great, but you should graduate from Harvard to operate it. Today, most people recruited into armies across the world come from relatively modest backgrounds, and from this point of view Russian equipment is very user-friendly.

Q. What are  the biggest challenges facing the Russian defense industry?

A. There are a whole series of challenges. Some are common to all defense industries, some unique to Russia, and I would say even unique for Putin's Russia. The common challenge is affordability, and what you outsource.

Russia's biggest unique challenge is planning procurement for its security environment. The environment has drastically changed for the worse in the last 18 months. We were not allies of the West before the Ukraine crisis, but we weren't enemies. Four years ago there was no major Russian conventional force in the European part of Russia; we were reinforcing our South against potential Islamic insurgency or an explosion of the frozen Karabakh conflict, or even a potential second war with Georgia. At the same time we were very cautious about China. We have very close dialogue with China and are very close politically, but deep down there is a big, big fear of China. It is a giant with lots of potential and a mighty army, which has made a very tremendous technological and military jump in the last two decades.

Today, on top of all this, we have an open military conflict on our Western border in Ukraine. We now have hostile relations with NATO and we should take that into account,  plus there is a Russian perception that there is potential for a future war in the Arctic.

I think that if you are the current chief of staff, you should be having nightmares. You can hardly sleep at night when you see your resources have shrunk, that your defense industrial base is not as good as it was at the end of the Soviet Union - the USSR collapsed at the peak of its technological might - and then you have threats all around your borders.It's not an easy task to prepare a defense for this, and now that we are under a technological embargo from the West it will not be easy to fulfill the 2020 rearmament program.

Q. You are a civilian who specializes in defense industrial matters. Why did you focus on the Russian arms industry in the 1990s, when the system was falling apart?

A. Like the majority of Soviet children, I was raised as a romantic militarist. I even entered one of the [Soviet-era] Suvorov Military Academies - a type of school for boys in the last two years of high school aspiring to become military officers. That was in 1988, so it was the time of perestroika and there was a lot of bad publicity about the military, and after spending a few days at this school I took my papers back and returned home to my high school.

However, this romantic militarism hadn't vanished completely, and I thought to myself, 'what is the first line of defense? It is diplomacy.' So I applied to the Moscow State Institute for International Relations [MGIMO]. After four years there, Russia was changing quickly. When I was in the second year, the USSR collapsed and young Russia was opening up to the world. At that time we started to adopt the Anglo-Saxon system of four years of bachelors degree and two in a master program. MGIMO was the first Russian school to launch a master program, and I joined a special program run by MGIMO and the French Institute of Political Studies in Paris. The last year of the program involved an internship, and I volunteered for the Russian embassy in Paris.

Meanwhile, another student, my future business partner Konstantin Makienko, was interning at a French research center called CREST. He worked largely on issues of the defense industry and arms trade. Me and my partner were largely inspired by their model, and after four months at the embassy in Paris I was slightly disappointed by the foreign service. Then the Russian Foreign Ministry, at least in practice, was still very much the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and international relations, politics and economics were no longer going through the embassy, there were many other possible avenues, and so when Makienko and I returned to Russia we started working on creating our own research center similar to the French CREST.

Q. How did you start CAST? What were the major challenges to launching an open source defense think tank in the wake of the Soviet collapse?

A. We wanted to create this think tank, but since we were still young Soviets we didn't know how the economy worked. We saw only how the French center functioned, but we didn't know where the money came from. Eventually we understood that they got over two-thirds of their money via direct or indirect contributions from the French government or state-run defense companies like Thales or Dassault, and that only 20 to 25 percent of that money was earned by selling expensive bulletins on a weekly basis. We understood that we couldn't do that, but we could do a monthly publication about the defense industry and arms trade - mainly about the Russian one, but also a partially about the foreign ones - so we launched it and were relatively successful at the beginning.

Q. Why do you think you were successful at the start?

A. I think the main reason was that there were no rivals on [the Russian] market at the time. There were some glossy publications that were publishing essentially advertisements, or worse - the old Soviet magazines that were oriented toward either a very technical or absolutely non-Western type of information consumption. The model of information consumption under capitalism and socialism was different, and by that time we had learned from our French professors how you are supposed to present your pieces - they should be relatively short, condensed and logical. As they say, Cartesian.

We decided we would create a trade publication for people who were either producing and selling arms legally, like state-run trade, or those who wanted to learn more about it - such as a foreign defense attaché in Moscow, or the owner of a transportation company, or bank interested in giving a loan to a Russian enterprise and get the investment back once the contract is fulfilled. So we thought about what was interesting for our clients, not interesting for us, and we published our fist issue of Eksport Vooruzheniy [Weapons Exports] in April 1996 and sent out something like 300 copies that we made on printers. I remember that I killed several cartridges in my friends' offices, but we only had two subscribers at first - the Czech Air Force attaché and the South Korean Air Force attaché.

Q. How did you expand from writing a monthly Russian defense industry bulletin to doing think-tank style research reports and commissioned research projects?

A. After reading our magazine, some of our subscribers started coming to us and saying, 'We like this article. Can you write for us a mini-research piece, a kind of analytical paper, but exclusively for us and not for others?' So it was derived from our publishing program. Sometimes it could be just like an article for the magazine that we only give to one client. They never asked for technical reports, it was always kind of interdisciplinary.

Our first order was from the MiG aircraft corporation. They wanted us to analyze the Nigerian arms market, and I told them they could ask people in military intelligence, but MiG insisted those guys would give them 'War and Peace' - two volumes that no one has time to read. They needed a thin and lean snapshot of what Nigeria really wanted, and what they would actually buy.

Another reason that I think people started coming to us was because from the beginning, we worked actively with the media. The expert community in Russia at that time wasn't very big and could be broken down into retired military and intelligence people, who weren't eager to talk to journalists; people at the Russian Academy of Science who knew about international relations but not the arms trade or defense industry; and journalists who were quite proficient in defense industry affairs, but journalists don't like to cite other journalists. We were young experts ready to work with the media, and we always avoided the temptation to comment on other issues. Sometimes journalists would ask us to comment on nuclear non-proliferation or about the war in Chechnya, but those weren't our fields of expertise so we refused. It was hard to say no, or that I don't know, but at that time journalists valued those responses and saw them as mature and professional.

Q. You also publish an English magazine, Moscow Defense Brief.

A. It is different from Export Vooruzheniy, which is kind of a trade publication for arms producers and arms traders in Russian. With Moscow Defense Brief we quickly understood that we should go broader than the arms trade, but since we were not famous experts in issues that weren't our own, we started looking for experts to write in this magazine, and we developed a cadre of "Sunday defense analysts" - people who are very knowledgeable but not necessarily part of the establishment, but know their subject very well. Moscow Defense Brief has smaller articles, and sometimes they can just be things like a table of combat crashes in Chechnya, or accidents with submarines in the 1990s, and so we gather open-source information for people to use in their work. Moscow Defense Brief is in a sense raw material that people can use as a primary source, and that's why some of the subscribers are academics, like Georgetown University or the people at Rand.

But now we are facing a severe challenge for Moscow Defense Brief. Apart from the devaluation of the ruble, the deterioration of relations between Russia and the West has created a situation where the majority of publications out of Russia written in English are considered to be propaganda if they are not openly critical of the Putin administration. Our approach was always that we are experts, not actors. We are writing about concrete things that you can use to either criticize or praise Putin; it's entirely up to you. But we are considering closing Moscow Defense Brief and starting an English-language blog. Moscow Defense Brief has become very difficult to sell, and anyway we do an annual book in English - such as our most famous one, which we published last year, "Brothers Armed: Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine."

Q. How is CAST allowed to publish all this information in English for a foreign audience and maintain such active contact with the foreign press while working on research projects for the Defense Ministry?

A. We confess to using an old strategy based on the motto of Russia's most famous general, Alexander Suvorov from the 18th century - "I am not asking to serve, but I will not refuse service." We have never been proactive in courting the Russian government agencies, but since we are out there, they contacted us after a certain time. For example, at a public seminar we met with the now late Gen. Vladimir Popovkin, who used to be first deputy head of the Defense Ministry for procurement before going to head up Roscosmos, and he wanted to hire us for some jobs.

Now we are in our third year of a research contract with the Ministry of Defense. This is not a direct contract since we aren't cleared for classified information, but we are subcontractors through the 46th Central Research Institute, which focuses on the Russian defense industry. For example, one of our tasks is looking at how to substitute imported components cut off by international sanctions by outsourcing their development to developed countries that are not technically part of the western world - such as Israel, Singapore, China and South Korea, maybe Mexico.

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 #22
www.rt.com
August 9, 2015
As real as the Yeti - Western propaganda tries to invent Siberian Nationalism
By Bryan MacDonald
Bryan MacDonald is a journalist. He began his career in journalism aged 15 in his home town of Carlow, Ireland, with the Nationalist & Leinster Times, while still a schoolboy. Later he studied journalism in Dublin and worked for the Weekender in Navan before joining the Irish Independent. Following a period in London, he joined Ireland On Sunday, later re-named the Irish Mail on Sunday. He was theater critic of the Daily Mail for a period and also worked in news, features and was a regular op-ed writer. He has also frequently appeared on RTE and Newstalk in Ireland as well as RT.

Siberia is not about to separate from Russia. Recent reports in Western media are typical of anti-Russia hysteria.

Britain was late to the Lottery game. I'm unsure whether it was a romantic attachment to the Football Pools or the last remnants of stoic, Protestant values. Anyway, the UK didn't 'enjoy' its first National Lottery draw until 1994.

Nobody does light-entertainment TV as well as the Brits and the BBC took to the format with gusto. Soon, a Lancashire lady called Mystic Meg was a household name. Meg's slot was good fun. The pseudo-psychic would attempt to predict facts about the future winner. Of course, Meg was usually very wrong. Her repeated failures became something of a national institution and the butt of countless jokes.

Not being a fan of 14 million to 1 bets, I haven't followed the Lottery too closely since. Nor Meg's career. However, I've long suspected that the hapless clairvoyant might have inspired a lot of the commentary one reads on Russia in the Western media. Some of the predictions over the years have made Mystic Meg look entirely believable.

Hardly a month goes by when somebody isn't predicting Russia's imminent demise. The conspiracy theories usually vary. However, regular suspects are the collapse of the government, a Chechen war redux, a demographic implosion or an invasion by China.

The daddy of them all came back in 1999 when Anders Aslund predicted 'Russia's Collapse' in a seminal Foreign Affairs article. This groundbreaking piece pioneered the, then innovative, use of complete nonsense to scare the living daylights out of people in the West. It frightened investors, students and anybody who had any intention of discovering Russia at that time.

A Swedish Oxford graduate, Aslund had worked as an adviser to Boris Yeltsin's notoriously incompetent 1990's administration in Moscow. The 'shock therapy' prescribed by Aslund caused untold misery across Russia. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz described the policy as "a failure."

Nevertheless, in '99, a year after an economic crash had sidelined Aslund's protégés at the Kremlin, he twisted the knife. Amazingly, some still take Aslund seriously as a Russia analyst. Earlier this year, he predicted that Russia's economy would contract by 10 percent in 2015. The World Bank estimates 2.7%. On the basis that a stopped clock is right twice a day, Aslund has been trying to advise Ukraine, through the opinion pages of the Kyiv Post. Ukraine, frankly, has more than enough problems already.

Aslund's continued presence serves as proof that nobody ever went hungry from being continuously wrong on Russia. This surely warms the hearts of editors at the Economist magazine, where Mystic Meg may, or may not, work these days. Due to the fact that its articles aren't deemed worthy of by-lines, this is unclear.

As Business New Europe's Ben Aris pointed out last year, the Economist has "an institutional hatred" of Russia. "Those who cover and invest in Russia have long ago cancelled their subscriptions to the Economist; in Moscow at least it has a reputation for bias and selective reporting that makes its coverage next to useless," the experienced Moscow correspondent wrote.

Not content with weekly digs at Russia, that extend from the subtle to the crude, the Economist finally ran the full gamut of A to Z last week and hit rock bottom. In an article titled "If Russia Breaks Up,"  they took the biscuit to the extent that the proverbial Cheesecake was denuded. Attempting to conflate the Ukrainian civil war with the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese war, the anonymous Economist author made the magazine look even more silly than usual.

The Economist's supposition centered on the ill-informed notion that there exists a groundswell of support for Siberia separatism. Even more ridiculously the magazine alleged that the dominant Far Eastern cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk are "more economically integrated with China and South Korea than they are with the European part of Russia."

This is inaccurate on so many levels. In fact, the precise problem with the Russian Far East is that it's not integrated enough with east Asia and far too reliant on Europe and the rest of Russia for trade. Aside from a few ramshackle 'Chinese markets' and the odd Korean restaurant, Khabarovsk is as European as Galway or Lisbon, despite being over 6,000 km from the Ural Mountains. Recognizing the problem, the Kremlin has recently designated sections of the Far East as "special economic zones." If Moscow feared a breakaway, it would hardly make sense for it to encourage integration between the region and its Asian neighbors.

The Economist is not alone in the sudden, rather bonkers, obsession with the notion that the Russian state might disintegrate through Siberian separatism. Of course, it hardly needs mentioning that the periodicals own home nation, the UK, is much more likely to combust as Scottish nationalists become increasingly dominant in Edinburgh and Ulster's demographics point to a United Ireland before long.

In the past month, both Quartz and the Wilson Quarterly have been beating the same drum. The former, headquartered at Washington's iconic Watergate, is owned by Atlantic Media, which specializes in government-targeted publications. Meanwhile, the latter is controlled by the US capital's Wilson Centre. Incidentally, Aslund has been associated with the institution.

The Wilson Quarterly's Elizabeth Peet, a newcomer to Russia-focused journalism, based her entire argument on a Eurozine report by Stanislav Zakharkin. In turn, Zakharkin seems to have been inspired by a 2011 rally in Novosibirsk, titled 'Stop Feeding Moscow.' According to local sources, the protest was attended by the grand total of 100 people. Straws. At. Clutching. That was 100 folk in a city of 1.5 million souls. I've seen longer bus queues in Russia.

Not to be outdone, Quartz went for the jugular. Written by one Bradley Jardine, the article asked, "Could surging Siberian nationalism break up Russia?" When I stopped laughing, I realized that the author had interned at the US propaganda outlet, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The same RFE/RL that fired a Russian journalist last year for attempting to tell the truth about Ukrainian war atrocities. Perhaps, if Andrey Babitsky was still employed, he could have advised Bradley Jardine on the ridiculousness of his argument.

Jardine hilariously invokes 'tensions' and 'hostility' between Moscow and Siberia. He describes the 100-person march in Novosibirsk as a "major rally."

Now for the reality: there is more chance of Texas separating from the USA than Siberia suddenly shunting away from Russia. For starters, historic Siberia is 77 percent of Russia's total land area. The Siberian Federal District is 30 percent. Hence, even in the very unlikely event of Russian collapse, it would be the rest of the country separating from it.

There's also the fact that Siberia & the Russian Far East are more uniformly Slavic (95 percent) and Orthodox Christian than most 'European' Russian regions. This includes Moscow, which allegedly has a 91-percent ethnic Russian population, but that doesn't account for the vagaries of Russia's registration system. Furthermore, Asian Russians are generally more integrated than Caucasus Muslims, for instance.

This is not to say that Siberia's demographic make-up is the sole reason for its continued loyalty to Russia. Aside from cultural ties, Siberia needs the protection of the Russian state. Alone, its more densely populated Asian neighbors would overwhelm it.

However, natives never discuss such concerns. For one simple reason - Siberia is as Russian as Balalaikas and Seld Pod Shuboi (a famous herring-based salad). There's no desire in Novosibirsk to exit the Russian Federation and most locals would guffaw at the suggestion.

There's also no danger of Yorkshire departing from the UK, Provence leaving France or Colorado separating from the USA. Quite correctly, the Economist, Quartz and the Wilson Quarterly don't even entertain such crazy notions. Why then do they ignore reason when it comes to Russia?

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 #23
www.rt.com
August 9, 2015
Putin's initiative to create 'united front' to fight ISIS intrigues US, allies - Lavrov

The US and its allies should cooperate with Syrian President Bashar Assad in fighting Islamic State, "a common enemy" of the international community, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview on Sunday.

"Our American partners and some countries in the region persistently refuse to recognize Assad as a partner, which is rather strange," Lavrov said in an interview with Russian state Television channel Rossiya 1, aired on Sunday. "Assad was a fully legitimate partner in destroying chemical arms but somehow he is not when it comes to fighting terrorism."

A coalition against Islamic State (IS, formerly known as ISIS/ISIL), as planned by Russian President Vladimir Putin, would "bring together all those already fighting on the ground," that is, the Syrian and Iraqi armies, the Kurds and "the part of the armed opposition that represents Syrians."

"Instead of settling their scores with one another, first one must deal with the common threat, and then seek to agree on how to live in their own country," Lavrov said, adding that there was "a lot of superficiality and a lot of speculations" regarding the role of the Syrian government in the conflict with IS.

He revealed that President Putin's initiative was "two-trekked", proposing both a coalition of people who fight Islamic State militants on the ground and the promotion of a "political process" in order to prevent the incitement of civil war in Syria.

The foreign minister also recalled two recent meetings with his US counterpart John Kerry. He said he warned Kerry there was high risk that any fatal mistake in Syria could aggravate the conflict, to the point that nothing could control it. A much easier way, according to Lavrov, could be the negotiating table, but "the Americans are unfortunately not ready for it."

"We simply suggest cleaning up our methods from double standards, from attempts to approach any situation in a volatile way and divide terrorists into bad and good categories," Lavrov said, pointing out that "it won't work out".

On Tuesday, Lavrov is to discuss Syria and IS with Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir in Moscow, according to RIA-Novosti. They will also dwell on "closer coordination on global energy markets".

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 #24
www.rt.com
August 8, 2015
'Woman spent days near dead son's body waiting for help': RT reporter recalls 2008 war in S.Ossetia
[Graphics here http://www.rt.com/news/311948-ossetia-war-russia-georgia/]
 
Initiated by Georgia in the early hours of August 8, 2008, provoking the involvement of Russian troops and ending within five days, the war in South Ossetia saw hundreds of people lose their lives. Seven years on, RT's Madina Kochenova, who was reporting from refugee camps at the time, is still haunted by the tragic events she witnessed.

"The nights were the most difficult, because that was the time when buses full of women and children usually came," Kochenova, who was among RT reporters covering the conflict on the ground from its very first hours, recalled. "All of them were really frightened, most of them were looking for the members of their families, not having any information about them."

Kochenova says one story stands out as the most vivid in her memory: that of a woman who lost her son while they were both hiding in a basement. "She had to spend days holding the body of her son... while she was waiting to be rescued," RT reporter said.

What surprised the journalist most, was that RT was the only international TV crew who reported from South Ossetia and North Ossetia. "All the other international crews were in Georgia," she said.

In 2008, Western coverage of the military conflict was mostly biased, with Russia having been slammed as aggressor at outbreak of the five day war.

"We are a small country, but we are being attacked because we wanted to be free, we are being attacked because we wanted to build genuine democracy," then-Georgian president, Mikhail Saakashvili, was saying live on CNN, after Georgian military shelled South Ossetia, with Russia then sending its troops to protect its citizens and peacekeepers in the region.

"On the day before the fighting and shelling I was the acting head of [a] mission in Tbilisi for the OSCE. We were very worried about the situation, that's a fact," former senior OSCE official in Georgia Ryan Grist told RT. "There was clearly a Georgian military buildup south of Tskhinval on the 7th [of August, 2008]," he added.

"To my mind - and that's purely my own opinion - it was a ridiculous move on the part of the Georgian authorities, to engage in a military adventure in South Ossetia," Grist said.

In September 2009, the European Union commission released the results of its special research into the conflict. The EU-ordered report said the war had been started "with a massive Georgian artillery attack," with Tbilisi's actions having been unjustified. There was no ongoing build-up or armed assault by Russia before the launch of the Georgian operation, the report said.

Having violated a previously-reached ceasefire agreement, the 2008 Georgian assault started with the shelling of the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinval, with artillery and multiple-launch missile systems. A Russian peacekeepers' base and residential districts of the city came under attacks. Ordered by then-Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian military began an 'operation to force Georgia to peace' in the afternoon of the same day, shunting Georgian offenders far into Georgian territory.

Dozens of military staff on both sides were killed, with hundreds more injured in the conflict. Civilian casualties were much higher, with between 1,500 and 2,000 people killed, according to South Ossetian officials.

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 #25
www.rt.com
Mikhail Saakashvili is lesson to US neoconservatives: Color revolutions can be reversed
August 8, 2015

On the anniversary of the 2008 South Ossetia conflict, it appears that that act of Georgian aggression was just a dry run for the events now unfolding with disastrous consequences in Ukraine, Martin Summers, journalist and political commentator, told RT.

On August 8, 2008, the Georgian military launched a full-scale military offensive against South Ossetia, killing many civilians, as well as Russian peacekeepers, while triggering a 5-day conflict. Yet Russia was condemned in the Western media for starting the hostilities.

RT:Why was everyone so quick to blame Russia for initiating the war when Europe's own observers on the ground were indicating otherwise?

Martin Summers: Well, it's part of the narrative of neo-Russian imperialism, which was very common in the West at the time, and still is. And also, of course, the whole thing was premeditated by the Georgians in collaboration with Western intelligence agencies. They didn't decide to attack South Ossetia just off their own bat. And Saakashvili... was very much their man. He's been removed from power in Georgia, as you know, and has reappeared in Odessa, Ukraine.

RT:A few months after the war in South Ossetia, Western public opinion had started to shift. News outlets and politicians were saying that it was Georgia that had started the conflict, but perhaps that narrative did not gain as much attention.

MS: No, it didn't. If you've got a general narrative of Russia as the bogeyman, it takes a lot of contrary evidence for public opinion to be shifted. I think the facts that the Russian intelligence knew that something was afoot and they were prepared so that when Saakashvili began the aggression it was dealt with firmly and quickly and the war was over fairly quickly. Russia - or South Ossetia, if you'd like - clearly won and the West was left feeling that they had to justify what had happened, but they really couldn't. And in many ways, what happened in 2008 was actually a dry run for what we've seen happening in Ukraine over the last several years. At that stage, the US neoconservatives, who were pushing for a confrontation with Russia in the Caucasus, got their fingers burnt and they should have learned their lesson from that and this kind of thing was not going to work. And of course it also changed attitudes inside Russia because those groups within the establishment in Russia, who were pursuing a conciliatory policy towards Western powers, were made to look silly because the Western powers had deliberately provoked a confrontation that was unnecessary.

RT:So what is the extent of the similarities now with regards to Ukraine?

MS: Well, one obvious similarity is that Saakashvili, who was the president of Georgia in 2008, has reappeared in Ukraine as a roving gunslinger, as it were, appointed by [Ukraine President Petro] Poroshenko to be governor of the Odessa region, even though he's not a Ukrainian nationalist - there's plenty of non-Ukrainian nationals in the government of Kiev at the moment. And in Georgia itself, Saakashvili is wanted for various crimes against the state, including embezzlement, and so on. And the current government of Georgia - I was reading just yesterday - is not prepared to participate in any sort of sanctions against Russia over Ukraine and Crimea. That, in a way, is also a lesson to the neoconservatives in the West is that your color revolutions - like the Rose Revolution that brought Saakashvili to power - they can be reversed. There seems to be a much more rational leadership in Tbilisi now that sees itself in a balance between Russia and the Western powers and pursuing an independent policy, and not one of a crazy confrontation with a big neighbor like Russia.

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 #26
Civil Georgia (Tbilisi)
August 8, 2015
On War Anniversary Georgian Leaders Speak of Peace, Reunification   

On the seventh anniversary of the August 2008 war, PM Irakli Garibashvili said "peace has no alternative" and Georgian President Giorgi Margvelashvili said that "occupation lines" will eventually crumble and the country will be reunited through "reconciliation".

The President and PM visited separately on Saturday military cemetery at Mukhatgverdi in Tbilisi outskirts to pay tribute to Georgian soldiers fallen in the war. 166 Georgian army servicemen, 14 police officers and over 220 civilians died as a result of the August 2008 war.
 
PM Garibashvili told journalists that "wounds of August 2008 war remain unhealed."

"Peace has no alternative. If we want to reintegrate these territories and to live together with our Abkhaz and Ossetian brothers in peace, there is only one way to achieve this - through peaceful negotiations, through confidence building," he said.

"Of course we should continue prudent policy with Russia, but of course we will be very firm and principled, because these are our territories, territories bequeathed by our ancestors and the Georgian people will never tolerate [losing of these territories]," Garibashvili said.

He said that consequences of the war were grave. "Thousands of displaced people, over 100 lost villages, 20 percent of our territories occupied, and recognition of [breakaway regions] by Russia. Occupation continues. Our government tries to stop this process through prudent policies," the PM said.

President Margvelashvili told journalists: "Today we remember heroes, who sacrificed their lives for maintaining Georgia's statehood, and at the same time, we think even more thoroughly about the mistakes and think about what should be done," President Margvelashvili said.

"Georgia will be united, strong state; we will do it not at the expense of human lives, but through common policy," he said. "Earlier this year we launched discussions and consultations within the Georgian society, political parties and non-governmental organizations about where we all should be united regardless of political affiliations to pursue coordinated policy towards Georgia's unification."

"Georgia should be united and it should unite not through blood and confrontation, but through love and friendship. This process is underway and it will definitely yield success and results," President Margvelashvili said.

Also on August 8, the President traveled to the village of Nikozi in an immediate vicinity of the breakaway South Ossetia's administratively boundary, where he attended a church service in memory of those fallen in the war.
 
"We are in several hundred meters from Tskhinvali; artificial occupation line divides us - the line which we will cross through reconciliation," the President told journalists in Nikozi.

"Occupation is anomaly and injustice of history, which will not be tolerated either by Georgia or the international community," he said. "There have been numerous such artificial lines throughout history, but I guarantee that this line will be destroyed."

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 #27
Russia Direct
www.russia-direct.org
August 7, 2015
How Soviet intelligence acquired the nuclear bomb
Alexander Bondarenko, author of a new book about former Soviet foreign intelligence head Pavel Fitin, shares the inside story of how the Soviet intelligence service acquired the plans to the nuclear bomb from the U.S.
By Marina Obrazkova

Writer and military intelligence historian Alexander Bondarenko's new book Fitin tells the story of Pavel Fitin, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Soviet Union during the Second World War. In conversation with RBTH's Editor Maria Obrazkova, the author talked about his protagonist, the Soviet intelligence service, the impact of Soviet intelligence on the course of the war, and the creation of the Soviet nuclear industry.

Russia Direct: Alexander, tell us why you're interested in Fitin.

Alexander Bondarenko: I have long-standing contacts in the press office of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR). On the 70th anniversary of Victory Day in Russia, we took the joint decision that the life of the unjustly forgotten Pavel Fitin would make for interesting reading. I learned from confidential sources that on finding out about my book a renowned intelligence writer burst into tears! Because the idea hadn't occurred to him! Fitin is a fascinating character but as often happens in Russia he was simply forgotten.
RD: Is his biography of historical relevance today?

A.B.: Yes. After all, he was the first to warn [Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin, through {Lavrentiy] Beria [chief of the Soviet security and secret police apparatus (NKVD)], of the high probability of a German attack on the Soviet Union, but he was ignored...

Fitin's career path is also a fine example: a village lad from the Urals who became a self-made man. He graduated from Timiryazev Academy and worked as a book publisher for a village. He joined the security service via the publishing house. Government agencies were in the throes of Stalin's purges and about 800 young people with higher education were needed as recruits.

Our hero was one of the youngsters invited to join the NKVD in the secret service. After serving for just a year, he became the chief of intelligence! I was dumbfounded by his organizational skills and ability to find a common language with "veterans."

In one episode he helped the family of a lad who was on the wrong side of the front line. His family was in the rear in a woeful situation. When Fitin learned about what was happening, he sorted it out in a flash. The family was given an apartment and put on rations, which in wartime was nothing short of priceless.

RD: How old was Fitin then?

A.B.: He joined the intelligence service at the age of 31. He effectively created the concept of "intelligence" as we know it today. And not only intelligence - the idea of strategic "closed cities" for critical industries, including nuclear developments, also belonged to him.

He was the first to glimpse the potential of the atomic project and convinced the authorities to pay close attention to it. Through his efforts, the Soviet Union developed a nuclear bomb almost simultaneously with the United States. He set up the information channels to assist the country's leadership in the decision-making process. Now it is one of the most important branches of the service.

RD: Are there any new facts about the Great Patriotic War in the book?

A.B.: What's new is that, based on documents and eyewitness accounts, we can confirm the Soviet leadership's disdainful attitude to intelligence. After all, Fitin's vital information was not treated seriously. I mean, if it had been given due consideration, immense human sacrifices could have been avoided.

***
FItinWith the kind permission of book publisher Molodaya Gvardia, RBTH includes these excerpts from Fitin by Alexander Bondarenko on the development of nuclear weapons and the espionage mission "Operation ENORMOZ" during World War II.
***

"... We know that on December 22, 1942, a detailed report was forwarded from London to Moscow on work being carried out not only in Britain, but also in the United States. The document indicated that the Americans were already far ahead of the British in the development of an actual bomb. We also know about the start of an intelligence mission loftily entitled "Operation ENORMOZ" (unsurprising, since the Department of Scientific and Technical Intelligence was part of the 5th Division, Anglo-American). ENORMOZ is a Russian transcription of "enormous," which besides the literal meaning of "very large" also has connotations of "monstrous" and "terrible" in U.S. slang. But for some reason we were left in the dark about when the operation officially began...

Analyzing the materials in the intelligence report, Academician Igor Kurchatov, a.k.a. "the father of the Soviet atomic bomb" (he was the vital link between the two structures, so to speak), wrote in March 1943 to People's Commissar Lavrenti Beria:

"My examination of these materials shows them to be of inestimable value to our country and Soviet science... The materials contain vital markers for our research, allowing us to bypass many highly labor-intensive phases of development and uncover new scientific and technical ways of resolving issues."
Beria would shortly become the overseer of the "atomic project."

* * *

We shall suppress the urge to delve into the details of Operation ENORMOZ, since it is only of passing relevance to the subject of this book.

But it was thanks to Fitin that it all got started. According to experts, if he hadn't cast an eye on the reports about London's research, and then about Washington's, they would have been left lying around... No time for that - there was a war going on!

He immediately took charge of this field, directed it as intelligence chief, and dispatched his own people across the seven seas on specific assignments. Everyone had a role to play - in intelligence and life in general.

What's more - and this happened at the level of Fitin - we can clarify that Soviet military intelligence soon came onboard the "atomic project." German-born British Communist and world-renowned scientist Klaus Fuchs was proactive in establishing contact.

But in 1943 the State Defense Committee declared the main objective of military intelligence to be the acquisition of German military-political plans, while scientific and technical matters would be the exclusive prerogative of the scientific and technical intelligence branch of the NKGB (People's Commissariat for State Security). Contact with Fuchs was assigned to the foreign intelligence rezidentura (operations base for resident spies)...

The scale and focus of the work carried out under the "atomic project" can be gleaned from the top-secret plan approved by Pavel Fitin on November 5, 1944.

* * *

"... The most critical facility in the U.S. nuclear program was the Los Alamos National Laboratory, employing about 45,000 service and civilian personnel. The construction of the first atomic bomb involved 12 Nobel Laureates in Physics from the United States and Europe.

These people were not only well aware of what they are doing at that precise moment and the role that nuclear weapons would play in the near future, but also concerned about the long-term prospects. Some U.S. scientists even wrote to President Roosevelt to propose that he share the country's nuclear secrets with the Soviet Union... Needless to say, the proposal was not welcomed.

It was then that these intellectuals (we don't know who exactly) opted for Plan B, which involved transferring the nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union by themselves. A source in the New York rezidentura put it like this:

"There is no country except the Soviet Union that could be entrusted with such a terrible thing. But since we are powerless to take it away from other countries, let the Soviet Union know of its existence and be kept in the loop about testing and construction. Then the Soviet Union will not be in the list of countries able to be blackmailed."

* * *

"... People, even those far removed from Communist convictions (and entirely selflessly at that), sought to help the Soviet Union in its righteous struggle against fascism, and did not want the post-war Soviet Union to end up defenseless in the face of the world's mightiest imperialist power...

There was, for instance, a case when an anonymous individual handed over a package to our Consulate General in New York, which turned out to contain top-secret materials on the "Manhattan Project" - as designated by the Americans. Having dropped off the package, the "benefactor" immediately left, and their identity was never established...

... The information came from various sources, but as far as we know, it all turned out to be extremely reliable - no false leads or dead-ends. Moreover, the work of Soviet intelligence under Operation ENORMOZ stayed under the West's radar for a long time, despite the veil of absolute secrecy that shrouded the Manhattan Project, and the best efforts of foreign intelligence services to keep it in place. For this reason, when at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference U.S. President Harry Truman "casually mentioned" (his own words) the testing of a "new weapon of unusual destructive force," Western leaders even indulged in a spot of irony.

Churchill later wrote in his memoirs: "I was sure that [Stalin] had no idea of the significance of what he was being told."

But, as the saying goes, he who laughs last laughs best... And Stalin can be said to have had the last laugh - on August 29, 1949, to be precise, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon.

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 #28
http://us-russia.org
August 9, 2015
Review of Gilbert Doctorow's Does Russia Have a Future?
By James W. Carden
James Carden is a contributing editor to The American Conservative magazine and is a frequent contributor to The National Interest and Russia Direct. Formerly an Advisor to the US Department of State, he resides in Washington, DC.

Dr. Doctorow, a Brussels-based commentator on European and Russia affairs and the European Coordinator for the newly established American Committee for East-West Accord*, has written a timely, eloquent, and, what is more, thought-provoking corrective to the reigning neoconservative and neoliberal pieties that so distort and undermine understanding between the former Cold war rivals.

Written during a nearly unprecedented time of tension between the U.S. and Russia this incisive, lively book documents, nearly in real time, the actions and words of some of the main players in the unfolding drama, frequently revealing the many (low) motives of a small coterie of Western opportunists and cynics who are largely responsible for brining us to this perilous moment.

How did we, exactly, get to this moment? In 2009, the foreign ministers of Poland (the now disgraced Radek Sikorski) and Sweden (DC think tank fixture Carl Bildt) launched what is known as the Eastern Partnership project. The aim of this recklessly utopian project was to bring 6 of the former Soviet states into the European Union. This would be accomplished through a series of binding protocols - the EU's acquis communautaire - which would - in effect - disallow these states from maintaining existing trade ties with Russia. Russia, not surprisingly, objected to the project when it came time for Ukraine to sign onto it in Vilnius in November 2013.

When the Russian President saw the writing on the wall, he proposed a tripartite agreement between Russia, the EU and Ukraine which would address Russia's concerns over being, in effect, excluded from what, for them, heretofore had been a vitally important trade area. Putin's tripartite proposal was rejected, Yanukovych spurned the acquis, protests erupted in Kiev, Yanukovych fled, and the war came.

But the war did not come, at least initially, from Russia. It came from an unelected government in Kiev, which opened fire on anti-Madian protesters in Mariupol (killing 9, wounding 50) and in Krasnoarmiysk (killing 2 at a polling station) in April 2014; this was followed shortly by the massacre in Odessa in which over 40 anti-government, pro-Russian protesters were barricaded inside a building and incinerated. By mid-May 2014 Kiev began a shelling campaign, terrorizing the civilian population of the breakaway regions (which continues to the present day).

For the hearty band of armchair militarists who are endlessly banging the drum for further American intervention in Ukraine, these are terribly inconvenient facts. Though facts they are, and facts they will remain.

And this brings us back to Doctorow and his book. What he has done is tackle, head on, a problem which "dare not speak its name" within the Beltway: that of the malign influence a claque of neoconservative and liberal interventionist "hawks" have on the conduct of American foreign policy. Policymakers like Samantha Power, Victoria Nuland, and Susan Rice, and activists and journalists like Bill Browder, Robert Kagan, Anne Applebaum (wife of the aforementioned Sikorski), Fred Hiatt, Anders Aslund, and many many others have joined forces to form a bipartisan War Party which seeks to exacerbate rather than defuse the conflict roiling the Donbas.

They continually emphasize Russia's culpability for the crisis, all the while doing their best to whitewash Kiev's (and the West's).

Yet the book's main virtue is that, unlike the neocons he so effectively and ruthlessly castigates, Doctorow recognizes that "the hatred otherwise educated people bear for those who do not bend with the wind" is anathema to free debate and open inquiry.

I cannot possibly put it better than the author himself: "The fundamental premises of international relations which have been taken on faith for too long must be openly debated. Only then can we begin to address lost opportunities with Russia...and with many other powers as well."

Because the war in eastern Ukraine still threatens to metastasize into a full blown war between Russia and the West, Doctorow's message is all the more timely; that his book contains essential truths about how and why we got to his point makes it essential.

*Full Disclosure, I serve as executive editor the Committee for East-West Accord's eastwestaccord.com

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 #29
Moscow Times
August 10, 2015
Propaganda Lessons From an Old - a Very Old - Master
By Michele A. Berdy

How can you convince men to go to off and fight a war in another country? What arguments will be most persuasive? What tricks of rhetoric will get them to sign up?

If these questions sound very modern, think again.

These were some of the problems facing a Dominican priest called Humbert of Romans in France in the 13th century as he considered how to convince his flock to go fight in the Crusades. Humbert wrote two treatises to help his fellow preachers convince young men to join the battle.

Almost 800 years later, Valentin Portnykh, a medieval history scholar and Ph.D. in history at Novosibirsk State University, began to study one of Humbert of Romans treatises called "On the Preaching of the Holy Cross," which was a set of instructions on what arguments and slogans would be most effective in convincing men to join the Crusades. Portnykh's work over many years produced a new text and new translations into contemporary Russian and French.

When Portnykh was studying at university in Lyon, his adviser, Nicole Beriou, directed his attention to this treatise by Humbert of Romans. The text was preserved in 23 handwritten versions and one early printed version. "Historians knew and quoted the treatise," he said in a telephone interview with The Moscow Times, "using the text that was printed in 1495 in Nuremberg, Germany. But no one had done a 'genealogy' of all the manuscripts. No one tried to reconstruct the hypothetical original text. That's what I did."

Based on a study of the content of the treatise, such as events that were mentioned, scholars had dated the original text to 1266-68. One of the manuscripts was allegedly datable to the 13th century, but Portnykh was able to conclude that it wasn't the original text. It was a copy like all the other extant versions. "Just because a manuscript is from the 13th century, it doesn't mean the text is closer to the original than a manuscript of the 15th century," Portnykh explained. "The 13th century manuscript had a large fragment of text missing, and it was clear that the text was left out by error - a lapse of attention - rather than for any political reason. So that was clearly a copy, too."

By carefully studying and comparing all 24 extant versions of the treatise, Portnykh was able to reconstruct the original document. That took nearly five years. Then he set to work on translating the Latin into contemporary Russian and French.

To do his translation into Russian, he enlisted the aid of a colleague in Novosibirsk. "I asked Ivan Remorov for help not only because he was a teacher of Latin, but because he was also a priest. It's a text about the Crusades that is filled with religious terms that I didn't know that well. He really helped me with the style, so the language would have all the beauty of modern religious writing."

The translation has been submitted for publication and will come out later this year. The French translation, which was edited by Portnykh's colleagues in France, is expected to be published next year.

For scholars, Portnykh said, "the document is a very significant source about how Western man in the Middle Ages viewed a holy war - a war conducted under a sacred slogan." And it may also be interesting to Middle East specialists, for whom the Crusades were a key link in the chain that led to today's current complex political and religious relations in the region.

But the treatise might also be useful to anyone studying propaganda. "The treatise was not for the general public, but for other preachers," Portnykh said, "It's instruction on what to say, a collection of arguments. A priest had to know which were the best slogans and arguments for each audience."

Among more serious examples, Portnykh noted some arguments that are still used today, albeit in a very different context. "Fighting in a Crusade gave a full pardon of all sins," Portnykh said. "And sometimes the priests used phrases that are close to modern advertising slogans like 'Sale! Special price!' Humbert of Romans and other preachers would say, 'Hurry while the Kingdom of Heaven is cheap. Very few people get this chance! You just have to make one effort, albeit a big one, and if you sincerely repent you'll be fully pardoned and go to the Kingdom of Heaven."

"Humbert and the other priests were telling them, 'Dying is a bargain!'"

The critical edition of the text and Russian translation will be published by Indrik Press at the end of this year.

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#30
Sputnik
August 10, 2015
US' New Anti-Russian Strategy: Confront and Reassure?

The anti-Russian sanctions Washington and its allies launched over a year ago have apparently failed to reach their goal; however, rather than normalizing relations with Moscow, the US foreign policy magazine Foreign Affairs suggests that the US must take aggressive new steps against Russia.

Foreign Affairs, a US journal of international relations and US foreign policy, which is published by the Council on Foreign Relations, sees no way for US-Russia relations to return to normal.

The Council on Foreign Relations' membership roster serves as a veritable who's who of Wall Street and Washington insiders; its membership has included more than a dozen Secretaries of State as well as CIA directors, defense industry executives and CEOs of multinational corporations but is restricted to US citizens.

Let's have a look at what the latest edition of their policy journal has in mind for Russia.

Sanctions Not a Success? Bring On More Sanctions!

While lamenting that the current US anti-Russia sanctions have not been a success, it put forth additional ways of pressuring Moscow.

Even though acknowledging that anti-Russian sanctions failed, the outlet suggests similar, additional measures, albeit with more precise targeting.

The magazine is convinced that even though "ordinary Russians" don't mind paying the price of sanctions, "it is hard to believe that the Russian elite will bear such burdens willingly."

Thus it suggests that "the first round of sanctions targeted not whole sectors of the Russian economy but key individuals responsible for the annexation of Crimea and incursion into Ukraine, blocking their ability to travel abroad and freezing their assets."

"Many more names could be added to the lists - every parliamentarian who voted for the annexation of Crimea, for example - and the sanctions could be made broader and more draconian, complemented by a more aggressive push to punish gangsters and kleptocrats. Adding the names of spouses and children to the lists poses legal challenges, of course, but would also end an obvious loophole, as potential targets of sanctions often transfer assets to relatives."

Europe Should Also Put a Spoke in Russia's Wheel

One of the reasons that the sanctions regime has not been more effective, it supposes, is that "Moscow believes it can easily strike back at the West, dividing the allies and undermining their will to maintain the current restrictions. So long as Moscow believes an end to sanctions is on the horizon, it

"The West should ensure not only that it is as resistant as possible to Russian manipulation, but also that it is seen as such. Measures such as accelerating the development of the European Energy Union can minimize Russia's ability to use its oil and gas supplies as leverage against the West."

"The energy union may not exist fully until 2030, but by simply giving it priority, Europe can communicate its commitment to denying Moscow markets and options."

"This is, after all, a war of signals and symbols as much as it is one of concrete action."

Discrediting So-Called "Biased Media" and Cultivating a Climate of Skepticism Toward Russian Disinformation is Also on Agenda

"The rest of Russia's leverage comes from propaganda and the buying of influence-especially through Moscow's often-covert support for political movements abroad that undermine Western unity, from anti-federalist parties in Europe all the way to Texan separatists. It is crucial for the West to bring greater transparency to the flow of money into and out of Russia and to counteract Moscow's information warfare. The latter will require not fighting propaganda with propaganda, but discrediting biased media, challenging outright lies, and cultivating a climate of skepticism toward Russian disinformation."
It remains to be seen however, what "unbiased media" would be used for the purpose.

Countering Russia's Military Force

"The West will also need to counter Russia's political use of military force, from launching long-range bomber patrols in NATO airspace to Putin's regular boasts about Russian nuclear capabilities."

The current relations between the United States and Russia are at their lowest point since the end of the Cold War. Modern Russia is not the Soviet Union; that's why Washington should cool down its aggressive rhetoric towards Russia.

"Two can play at that game, however, especially because the Kremlin knows that NATO can outman, outmaneuver, and outgun Russia's forces. The West could show its teeth more directly, making explicit that it is not in Russia's interests to provoke a match of military capabilities. Beyond existing plans to pre-position US heavy armor in the Baltic states, the West could establish a permanent NATO forward base in the region for a rotating force of US and European combat troops. Likewise, Washington's current plan to create a Europe-wide missile defense system by 2018 could be oriented away from a notional focus on Iran, especially in light of the recent nuclear deal, to explicitly include Russia."

"Although such a move would not, on its own, defend Europe against a full-scale Russian attack, it would be a symbolic statement about the extent to which Moscow is considered a genuine threat."

Let us not forget that "this is, after all, a war of signals and symbols as much as it is one of concrete action".

The policy of confrontation, however, seems not to be the best idea altogether. Thus the outlet suggests that "the West must balance confrontation with reassurance. After all, Russia needs support, both moral and political, as it adjusts to its new, reduced place in the global order."

"Western policy needs to be more imaginative and multi-vectored," it therefore concludes.
 

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 #31
Euromaidan Press
http://euromaidanpress.com
August 9, 2015
Is Putin normal?
By Robert van Voren
Robert van Voren is a Sovietologist by education, a Honorary Fellow of the British Royal College of Psychiatrists and Honorary Member of the Ukrainian Psychiatric Association. He was also Permanent Representative of Ukraine in the Benelux for Humanitarian Affairs in 1994-1997, and in 2005 he was knighted by Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands for his work as a human rights activist. He is currently Professor of Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas (Lithuania) and Ilia State University in Tbilisi (Georgia).

Over the past year many people have approached me, both in private and in public, with the question whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is "normal" or in fact suffering from a form of mental illness. How can a man, who drives his country into a state of hysteria, who violates international law on a daily basis and puts everything at risk both for his country and himself, not be suffering from some serious mental health problem?

The premise of this view is, that "normal" people do not do such things, and also that there is a clear line between "normal" and "not normal". The first mistake lies actually already in this misunderstanding of reality. "Normality" is a rather fluid notion, very much determined by socio-cultural norms and values, which in turn can change considerably with time. What is considered "normal" now might have been considered quite abnormal half a century ago. A perfect example is that of homosexuality, which until 1973 was classified as "mental illness" by the World Health Organization. Although it is now considered fully normal in civilized societies, there are still plenty countries where it is seen as "abnormal" and even punishable by death.

In the 1970s and 1980s, a Dutch patient organization had a wonderful anti-stigma campaign, in the course of which posters were put up in bars and cafes throughout the country. The poster had the form of a mirror, and on it was written: "Have you ever met a normal person? And did you like it?" When in 1987 a Soviet psychiatrist, for the first time in the West, saw the poster he asked me to explain it because he could not understand. For him it was black and white: either you are normal or you are not. I pointed outside and told him: "Listen, half of Amsterdam is crazy, but does that mean they are not normal?" This was too much for him to grasp.

History has shown that persons involved in vile things like mass-murder and torture are often, or maybe even most of the time, not mentally ill. This is easily explainable: persons with mental illness, or psychopaths, are uncontrollable, they go berserk when given the chance. A murderous regime needs people it can control, people who carry out orders and stick to them, and for that purpose one needs "normal" people, mentally healthy persons. Most people who engage in mass murder are standard citizens, middle-of-the road, persons who are unassuming and would otherwise never have attracted any attention. And even the masterminds of criminal regimes are usually horribly "normal". The leaders of Nazi Germany on trial in Nuremberg were all psychiatrically examined, and all found to be perfectly "normal". One of the psychiatrists involved in the examinations even exclaimed: "they were much more normal than I was after examining them!" Most had even high IQ's, the lowest being 122 of Secret Service chief Alois Kaltenbrunner, while two of them were even geniuses with IQs of 146 and 148. Also, most of the leaders of the murder battalions that in 1941 killed hundreds of thousands of Jews and Communists after the invasion of the USSR were intelligent men, and quite a few of them were actually lawyers with a PhD. In other words: intelligence is no guarantee against being evil.

Coming back to Putin, there is an interesting historical repetition in his case and that of his spiritual godfather, KGB-chief Yuri Andropov, who led the KGB during its active campaign against "ideological diversion" in the years 1967-1982. Andropov, who started his career in 1940 in recently occupied Karelia and was subsequently actively engaged in liquidating all bourgeois elements and other potential opponents of "Soviet legality", became Soviet Ambassador in Hungary in 1956. As a result, he found himself entrenched in the Soviet Embassy in Budapest during the Hungarian Uprising. From the windows of his fort, he could see how agents of the Hungarian secret service were hanged from lampposts across the street. This was undoubtedly a highly traumatizing event for him. He promised himself never ever to allow that to happen again, and this traumatic memory guided him through the rest of his life.

Vladimir Putin, who started his KGB career under Andropov and reached a rather mediocre position at the KGB station in Dresden in Communist East-Germany, found himself entrenched at the KGB residency in that city in late 1989 when demonstrators attacked and occupied the building of the East-German secret service Stasi across the street, and then turned onto the KGB residency. They were already on the territory when the physically rather unassuming Putin stepped out and warned them not to go further. "My men are armed and will open fire if you continue," he allegedly said. The demonstrators reconsidered and left, leaving a badly shaken Putin and his fellow KGB officers behind. In no time the DDR collapsed, and everything that was certain and holy disappeared overnight. In the end, Putin and his family left Dresden for Leningrad with as their main possession a second-hand refrigerator. This end to his KGB career could hardly have been more demoralizing, leaving Putin probably as traumatized as his spiritual godfather 23 years earlier.

Yet Putin seems to lack the intelligence of Yuri Andropov, who saw that his country was almost irreparably ill and during his last months acknowledged that the invasion into Afghanistan had been a very bad mistake, a "bridge too far". Where Andropov realized that his country should refrain from costly foreign adventures, Putin uses them as the main elements in his foreign policy. While Andropov realized how hollow the slogans of Communism had become, Putin embraces such slogans, and his rule has become a culmination of emptiness.

Putin is very normal, believe me. Sure, his behavior is influenced by a messed-up youth and a basically failed KGB career, by believing in something that turned out to be not more than a Potemkin Village. His reaction is to long back to such a façade, and in order to feel secure he set about to create one himself. His character is in fact perfectly described by awell-known British psychiatrist, coincidentally the cousin of "Borat" who in extenso ridiculed rulers of the Putin-type. Simon Baron-Cohen is the author of the book "The Science of Evil", that describes the multiple factors that influence the behavior, and crimes, of people like Vladimir Putin. Putin perfectly fits the person with no empathy, or even negative empathy, and when reading the book I cannot escape the constant image of Russia's current president before my eyes.

Yet lack of empathy is no mental illness. Alas for us there is no easy escape, no easy way out of the painful realization that Putin is just one of us, and that mankind is full of little Putin's who when given the chance can create immense pain and suffering, to which they themselves remain immune.

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 #32
Washington Post
August 9, 2015
Vladimir Putin, failed spy
By Jim Hoagland
Jim Hoagland is a contributing editor to The Post. His e-mail is jim.hoagland@washpost.com.

The ex-KGB officer seated in front of me raised his hand to interrupt my brief monologue on Vladimir Putin's "hybrid" war in Ukraine. It was clearly the work of someone formed by the Soviet intelligence service, I was opining, of someone expert in covert operations and comfortable with deception as a strategy.

"Wait!" my interlocutor barked. "The truth is he is not one of us." I blinked. Another veteran of Soviet intelligence at the table nodded briskly in support of this comment.

That moment led me to other conversations, over a matter of months, with U.S. and European intelligence operatives who had studied the Russian president's 17-year KGB career. They too traced a portrait of Putin as a failed spy who was being squeezed out of the KGB when the Soviet system collapsed and political connections suddenly offered him a route to power.

"He was seen in the system as a risk-taker who had little understanding of the consequences of failure," one said. "The KGB of that era was not keen on risk."

That analysis of Putin, rather than one of him as a master spy, fits more closely with what he has done as Kremlin boss. Putin today displays an open contempt for Russian public opinions and an uncaring disregard for the economy-damaging sanctions and international disapproval that his Ukraine adventure has provoked, traits that befit a drunken gambler.

When I pressed for details on Putin's time as a spy, I was pointed to the fact that he was given a backwater assignment in Dresden rather than in the East German capital in 1985, and then was sent to do counterespionage in Leningrad rather than Moscow at the end of that tour.

"It was a message that he should seek another career," said one of the operatives, all of whom insisted on anonymity and discretion about where and when our conversations took place.

Putin's rise from that point - with the help first of Leningrad Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and then-President Boris Yeltsin - is another story. He has shown cunning, tactical skill and, at times, statesmanship (in relations with the United States after 9/11, for example) along the way. But he has also shown a disturbing willingness to bet the farm even as his plans come a cropper.

The International Monetary Fund warned last week that Russia's economy will contract by 3.4 percent this year if sanctions remain in place. And the Pew Research Center reported that Russia is now viewed less favorably than the United States in most parts of the world. The image gap is 43 percentage points in Europe (where 69 percent had a favorable view of the United States versus 26 percent for Russia) and 42 points in Africa (United States 79 percent, Russia 37 percent), for example.

Most critically, Putin's regime has reached what Moscow Times columnist Vladmir Frolov last week bravely called a "let them eat cake" phase. Recent public excesses range from Putin's press secretary's multimillion-dollar wedding in Sochi to, as Frolov wrote, a "legally dubious decision to move the 2016 parliamentary elections by three months [that] gives the Kremlin no political advantage while betraying an inner sense of insecurity and weakness. The president's [pursuit of] excessive ratings are turning into a source of political instability."

Moreover, the regime's threat to make a display of destroying European food imports that have found their way into Russia despite an embargo adopted to retaliate for sanctions "flies in the face of Orthodox values and the public sentiment traumatized by a history of famine, war and Soviet scarcity," he continued. The destruction took place on Thursday, by bulldozer, and was nationally televised.

The deepening wounds that Russia has suffered under Putin are almost entirely self-inflicted - a reality that has important implications for U.S. policy.

There are many reasons for the United States to exercise restraint in the Ukrainian crisis. Expecting Putin to reciprocate cannot be one of them. Nor can policy be built on the fear voiced by some strategists that we must accept the permanent neutralization of Ukraine to avoid pushing a weakened Russia into a collapse that would endanger global stability.

Putin's actions will determine how far and how fast Russia continues to sink into isolation and economic decline. The West should adopt a stance of watchful waiting and be prepared for Putin's risk-taking to create new crises along the way.

This is what I conclude from my modest inquiry: It turns out that Putin is not as clever either as I once thought, or as he seems still to believe.

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 #33
Salon.com
August 8, 2015
The U.S.-Russia "phony war": How Washington warmongers could bring us from stalemate to catastrophe
One of two outcomes is likely: Another long Cold War, or a great power conflict
By Patrick L. Smith
Patrick Smith is Salon's foreign affairs columnist. A longtime correspondent abroad, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune and The New Yorker, he is also an essayist, critic and editor. His most recent books are "Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale, 2013) and Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World (Pantheon, 2010). Follow him @thefloutist. His web site is patricklawrence.us.

The Ukraine crisis and the attendant confrontation with Russia assume a "phony war" feel these days. As in the perversely calm months between the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the Blitzkrieg into the Low Countries the following spring, nothing much seems to be happening.

No one took comfort then-a fog of anxiety suffused everything-and no one should now. One almost prefers it when Washington politicians and other temporarily important people are out there grandstanding and warmongering. At least part of what is occurring is visible, even as the whole never is. Now one sees almost nothing, and we get an idea of what the historians mean when they describe the queasiness abroad during the phony war period.

A formidable file of political, diplomatic and military reports has accumulated by drips and drops of late, and it strongly suggests one of two things: Either we are on the near side of open conflict between two great powers, accidental or purposeful and probably but not necessarily on Ukrainian soil, or we are in for a re-rendering of the Cold War that will endure as long as the original.

One cannot look forward to either, the former being dangerous and the latter dreary. But it has to be one or the other, barring the unlikely possibility that Washington is forced to accept a settlement that federalizes Ukraine, as Europe and Moscow assert is sensible.

It is hard to say when this thought came to me, but it has to be since Secretary of State Kerry's May meeting in Sochi with President Putin and Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister. That session seemed to mark a dramatic turn toward sense at the time and won much applause, including here. But things have deteriorated ever since.

"Kerry is now sidelined on Ukraine, it seems, since his four hours with Putin last May," a prominent Russianist wrote in a personal note 10 days ago. "Another escalation by the war party-headed, I think, by [Vice President] Biden, [Senator] McCain, et al."

That did it for me. We are not quite back to square one, but we are not far from it. It is almost certainly clearer to Russians and Europeans than it is to Americans, but Washington acquired a forked tongue after the Minsk II ceasefire was signed last February, and the warmongers are trampling those favoring a negotiated settlement at this point.

A month after Kerry's one-day visit to Sochi, Senator McCain pitched up in Kiev yet again to deliver another of his "shame" speeches. Europeans should be ashamed, he said, for insisting on a diplomatic settlement in Ukraine and not doing enough to back Kiev's troops. That week, the Senate approved a bill authorizing the Pentagon to send Kiev an additional $300 million worth of defensive weapons.

McCain is one of those many on Capitol Hill who have no clue where shame lies in Ukraine. A coup Washington cultivated, producing a patently incompetent administration in Kiev openly dependent on violence-worshipping Nazi nostalgists? Six thousand dead and counting? A purposeful and absolutely pointless revival of tensions across Russia's western borders? No shame here, Senator?

A few days ago came news that American soldiers are to begin training the Ukrainian army this autumn. Given the Pentagon has been training the Ukrainian national guard since April, it is not too much to say Americans have assumed de facto control of the Ukrainian defense apparatus. And no wonder, given the well-known problems of corruption and incompetence in Ukraine's military and a lack of will among troops when ordered to shoot their own countrymen.

This is the new micro picture. In the course of a few months, Pentagon and State have re-upped their effort to encourage the Poroshenko government to resolve its crisis with rebellious citizens in the east of Ukraine on the battlefield-foursquare in opposition to Franco-German efforts to fashion a negotiated settlement in concert with Moscow.  Washington thus fights two fronts in the Ukraine crisis, a point not to be missed.

As to the macro picture, it now shapes up as very macro indeed.

As noted in this space a few weeks ago, Defense Secretary Carter made a grand sweep through the frontline nations where NATO will now maintain battle-ready materiel. Here are the numbers behind the display: NATO has increased military exercises in close proximity to Russia's western border from fewer than 100 last year-already an aggressive number-to more than 150. Reconnaissance flights and airborne exercises bumping up to Russian airspace have increased nearly tenfold.

NATO's European missile defense system, while altered during Obama's first term, proceeds apace-if you can believe it, still under the pretense that it is intended to protect the Continent from short-term missiles fired from Iran. Who is this fig leaf intended to fool, you have to wonder. I doubt even Tom Friedman takes it seriously.

Is the Russian military in an expansionary mode? You bet: new missile defense systems, a rapid reaction force increasing to 60,000, new tank and artillery units, air force upgrades. The country's borders start to bristle, and for the same reason they did during the Cold War decades: Russia's perception of a NATO threat on its borders is altogether realistic. Only ideologues given to subjective reasoning and allergic to historical causality-not to mention maps-could possibly think otherwise.

The timing here is remarkable. Kerry, the Europeans, Russians and Chinese signed an historically important accord governing Iran's nuclear program on July 14. Obama thereupon praised Putin for his cooperation-and it was key in getting the deal done. Lavrov, as Kerry recognizes, is a gifted diplomat.

Two weeks and two days later Treasury names 26 more Russian individuals and companies to its sanctions list. So far as I can make out, this was entirely out of the blue, in response to nothing.

"Treasury Department officials made no reference to the Iran deal in their announcement, or in a conference call with reporters," the Times reported. I am sure they did not. They described the list as a "routine step," The Times added. I am sure it was not.

The usual explanation for these things-bureaucratic muddle, officials in one cabinet silo declining to cooperate with those in another-does not plug in this time. I put this move down to either (1) another sop to Washington warmongers, (2) a good-cop, bad-cop routine the administration is trying on, (3) another skirmish in which the Kerry camp failed to prevail, or (3) an outmoded notion of impunity wherein American officials think they can do anything to anybody and there will be no comeback.

Ditto the latest on Malaysian Flight MH-17, downed on Ukrainian soil last year, and the ongoing nonsense concerning foreign-funded NGOs operating in Russia. Let us take these in order.

The Netherlands-led investigations into the downing of MH-17 have been unconscionably, not to say suspiciously, long in coming. The technical report on cause is due this October; the one assigning responsibility could run into next year. There can be only one reason the U.S. and other Western powers insisted on a Security Council vote last week nominally intended to name a tribunal to prosecute the guilty. Creating such a tribunal was out of the question, as was clear in the circumstances; the purpose was to prompt the Russian veto Moscow had made perfectly clear it would exercise.

Ask yourself: Why else require Security Council action when one of the five permanent members advised the other four it would not accept it?

We had our cue immediately after the crash. Kerry took the lead in vigorously, incessantly and irresponsibly insisting that Russian-supported insurgents had brought the plane down with a Russian-made missile. Any other explanation was cast as outside the tent of the permissible: It was deranged or advanced in the service of the Kremlin or flew in the face of plain facts, never mind there were almost none established.

This was politics from the start, in short. Were it otherwise, we all would have confined ourselves to mourning as proper inquiries proceeded.

Who is involved in the inquiries as we have them? The Netherlands leads Malaysia, Ukraine, Australia and Belgium. Fair enough the Malaysians are in on this, but I will qualify the point in a minute. Without qualification, what in hell is Ukraine doing investigating an incident in which it may possibly be implicated? It is already on paper accusing Russia of responsibility-a prima facie disqualifier.

As to the Australians, way too Cold War-ish for my money. The Belgians are a minor power but a cooperative Western power all the same.

As you may have guessed, I have no patience with the charade wherein ideology and politics do not animate this question. In my view, the truth of the MH-17 incident was doomed from the first by both.

Having a large number of victims among the dead does not qualify any nation to participate in an investigation. In a rational world this would disqualify them. Malaysian Airlines owned and flew the plane: Yes, Malaysians ought to be part of the inquiry-maybe even direct it. But a proper inquiry would be comprised of internationally recognized investigators, forensic scientists and jurists precisely from disinterested nations with records of non-ideological judgments.

Julie Bishop, the Australian foreign minister, after the vote: "The veto is a mockery of Russia's commitment to accountability."

Bert Koenders, the Dutch foreign minister: "I find it incomprehensible that a member of the Security Council obstructs justice."

Samantha Power, Washington's U.N. representative: "Russia has tried to deny justice to the 298 victims on that plane."

See what I mean? Rubbish from fools rushing in. None of these statements holds up as anything more than hyperbole for the peanut gallery. It is all pretend. Yet these nations, notably the U.S., propose to help determine who sits on a criminal tribunal.

Here is Vitaly Churkin, Russia's U.N. envoy, after the vote: "Political purposes were more important for them than practical objectives." With no apologies, I find this the truest thing said on the occasion.

Russia has since advanced its own proposal for a way forward on the MH-17 incident. It advocates what it has wanted all along: to internationalize the investigation by way of greater U.N. involvement beyond the Security Council. It wants a special envoy named, and it wants transparency by way of organization and working methods. It does not ask to participate in the inquiry. And it is critical of delays in the Dutch-led efforts.

I will say this simply: This is a rational proposal. I make no reference whatsoever to its origin in reaching my conclusion.

Washington, proving the point about consistency and dull minds, never tires of criticizing Moscow, Putin in particular, for its (or his) treatment of foreign-funded NGOs. Since 2012, they have been required to register as foreign agents-exactly as the U.S. requires. Alert readers will recall how this ruling is repeatedly used to advance the demonization of the Russian leader. The "foreign agents" bit is put down as a Stalin-era cover to suppress well-meaning people trying to do honorable things.

"MOSCOW, July 22-The MacArthur Foundation is closing its offices in Russia after more than 20 years of grant-making here, becoming the latest casualty of new restrictions meant to limit the influence of foreign organizations in Russia." So wrote the New York Times two weeks ago.

Think about this. MacArthur set up shop in Moscow during the Yeltsin years, when hyper-hubristic Americans thought they were going to remake all of Russia in their own image. Yeltsin had no objection, but unless you are unable to connect any dots at all you will recognize this as a problem-an accumulating disruption. Stephen F. Cohen's book in this period, "Failed Crusade," explains this in startling detail.

What kind of organizations is MacArthur going to fund? Its website says it "works to defend human rights." The Times says it backs "civil society organizations." I do not know about you, but when American do-gooders utter buzzwords like "human rights" and "civil society" I am immediately wary of the intent. So are Venezuelans, Russians and numerous others.

MacArthur is one of 12 NGOs and NGO-funders placed on a kind of watchlist last month; they could be required to close operations if their activities are deemed undesirable. Watchlist became "blacklist" in a matter of a few paragraphs in the Times account-a term the Times has a lot of nerve using-but never mind.

Others on it are George Soros' Open Society Institute ("...aims to shape public policy to promote democratic governance," its website explains), Freedom House (a notoriously russophobic Cold War subversion machine) and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, which began humbly enough doing community work in Flint, Michigan, but is now up to its knees in "civic activism" and "civil society development" in Russia and the former Soviet satellites. A project Mott funded in June studies "citizen protests, demonstrations, and discontent" in these nations. Just trying to do the right thing, per usual.

What business do the MacArthur Foundation or any of these other institutions have "shaping public policy in Russia?" How many people other than Americans are phony enough to fold deregulated private enterprise and free-market economics into a definition of human rights? We Americans may be drowsy from the lullaby of our excellent intentions always and everywhere, but the conceit is preposterous. It is best to understand it in context and with a brief history in mind-the kind our media will never supply.

My jaw hit the edge of my desk when I saw Freedom House listed among the NGOs unfairly (the baseline assumption) placed on Moscow's watchlist. As many readers will know, this group has gone around the world annually since the Cold War decades rating all nations as "free," "partly free," or "not free."

"Freedom in the World," wherein this stuff is published, is a blunt instrument, fair to say. So is "Freedom of the Press," another annual index. I love the 2015 map in the latter book: All Western nations are colored green, having a free press. Apart from Japan, Papua New Guinea, Ghana, Uruguay and a few specks in the Caribbean, there is no free press anywhere else on the planet.

Even if you agree with these assessments, Freedom House is problematic, to put the point too mildly. Cuba has long accused it of being a C.I.A. front, which is only administratively untrue: It routinely takes funds from the Agency for International Development, another U.S. government organization and a longtime conduit for money deployed in the service of foreign subversions.

A few years ago the Financial Times reported that State had used Freedom House as a conduit to fund "clandestine activities" in Iran. "Far more often than is generally understood," the FT quoted Freedom House as asserting, "the change agent is broad-based, non-violent civic resistance-which employs tactics such as boycotts, mass protests, blockades, strikes and civil disobedience to de-legitimate authoritarian rulers and erode their sources of support, including the loyalty of their armed defenders."

Paraphrase: We're into coups. Straight to the point, Freedom House started sending A.I.D. funds to Ukrainian "civil society" NGOs, which did years of advance work prior to last year's coup, as early as 2004.

All of these groups claim to be independent of government, but as Freedom House's history illustrates, this means only that Washington has outsourced certain of its unpublicized policy functions. The Ford Foundation, the granddaddy of all colluding NGOs, remains infamous for putting itself at the C.I.A.'s disposal since the ethically retarded John J. McCloy ran the shop in the 1950s and '60s. At the Cold War's height, McCloy has two or three Ford executives permanently assigned to manage liaison with the agency.

An incident last year caught my eye as an illustration of how this computes out on the ground.

Last August Moscow expelled one Jennifer Gaspar, a 43-year-old lawyer resident in St. Petersburg for a decade. Gaspar was been active in the "foreign agent" corner of the NGO scene and is married to Ivan Pavlov, a human-rights lawyer who founded and now runs the Institute for Information Freedom Development (a name I appreciate for its spooky Cold War ring).

The institute's latest financial report is here. Take a look at where it gets his money: A.I.D.; the National Endowment for Democracy, which is also in the coup business and is funded by Congress; Open Society; MacArthur; and Ford.

Last week, Moscow took its first action against an American NGO, declaring the N.E.D. undesirable. Here one sees how the game plays out.

No one seems to dispute the N.E.D.'s mission to destabilize governments not to Washington's liking. The media's trick-and they are ever-faithful to it-is simply not to describe the mission. Carl Gershman, the N.E.D.'s president, is on the record saying the agency's work is to funnel funds to opposition groups in countries such as Russia and Venezuela. The autumn prior to the coup in Kiev he described Ukraine as "the biggest prize."

Responding to Moscow's ruling that the N.E.D. has to go, Gershman wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post saying it is "the latest evidence that the regime of President Vladimir Putin faces a worsening crisis of political legitimacy."

Huh? The guy has an approval rating of nearly 90 percent. This, you see, is how the game plays out-as much as anything else a charade to keep Americans comfortable as their taxes finance subversions.

Here is my take on this whole NGO scene in Russia. Whatever good foreign NGOs may do-and there is some or even much, surely-they should indeed go home. Three reasons.

One. These groups were as drunk on ideological righteousness during the 1990s as Yeltsin was on vodka. This party is over. If a single point above any other can be assigned to Putin, it is that Russia is no longer a free-for-all. Again, Cohen's "Failed Crusade" tells the story.

Two. To assume Russians need American help in achieving social justice, a vibrant public sphere, a free press and an orderly democratic process is simply the height of silliness. These are all questions Russians are competent to decide upon and will. The flip side here: America is in crisis precisely because it has none of the above.

Three. NGOland has long, long been too polluted with mal-intended missions for any foreign power reasonably to tolerate such agencies on their soil. And they slip more mickeys into their drinks now than ever, it would appear. A lot of people, in and out of NGOs, seem to think-or believe, faith-like-that destabilizing Russia is a good idea. Sensible people know otherwise.

I still honor Sukarno, the charismatic Indonesian, for his remark in 1964, by which time he was fed up with Washington's covert efforts to foment the blood-soaked political purge and insurrection that would depose him three years later: "Go to hell with your foreign aid," the Bung, as he was affectionately called, told Americans. Time and again it seems to apply.

Who knows how long our phony war with Russia will last? It is hard to see through the fog, but I find in it one source of comfort.

Washington has been stymied in Ukraine, and may not have a next move. The client regime is too weak and unskilled, the economy is destroyed, European objections to a military solution too strong, and Russian resolve too firm. Hence this summer doldrum.

This column predicted American failure and retreat in Ukraine soon after hostilities between Kiev and the eastern regions broke out in the spring of last year. I hold to this. The eventual question, not yet ready to be posed, is how big a mess Washington will make as it withdraws. History provides no pleasing answer.

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 #34
Subject: New journal: Russian Politics
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2015
From: Richard Sakwa <R.Sakwa@kent.ac.uk>

I am on the Editorial Board of the new journal Russian Politics, which promises to be an important new venue for research devoted exclusively to Russia, covering politics, history, economy, international affairs and social matters. I would be most grateful if you could post the information below, to alert the wider community about the possibility of publishing in this new journal.

Introducing a New Academic Journal: RUSSIAN POLITICS (Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden and Boston, www.brill.com/rupo). Editor in Chief: Cameron Ross, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK; Associate Editors: Professor Vladimir Gel'man (European University at St. Petersburg, Russian Federation and University of Helsinki, Finland), and Professor Regina Smyth, Indiana University, Indiana, USA. The journal welcomes the submission of high calibre articles on all aspects of post-communist Russian politics, widely defined to include: political science, political sociology, political economy, foreign policy, security, and social policy. A key aim of the journal is to provide a forum for the exchange of scholarly ideas between academics in the Russian Federation and the West. In addition to internationally peer-reviewed research articles, Russian politics also publishes special thematic issues and shorter symposiums, book reviews and review essays. Submissions to Russian Politics must be must be unpublished and not under review in any other academic journal. Authors are requested to submit material for consideration in English (in exceptional circumstances we shall consider accepting articles in Russian). All contributions will be subject to a rigorous double-blind peer review process. There are four issues per year. The first issue will be published in early 2016. Articles should normally be 7-8000 words. We use the Chicago editorial system with endnotes. Please send manuscripts to Cameron Ross - c.z.ross@dundee.ac.uk

Professor Richard Sakwa,
School of Politics and International Relations
Rutherford College
The University
Canterbury
Kent CT2 7NX, UK

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