The Moscow Times

Market Matters : Oil Tax Pledge Buoys Markets
Markets surged after the swearing-in of Dmitry Medvedev as president in a pomp-filled ceremony Wednesday and a tax-cutting speech by Vladimir Putin the day after, when he was approved as prime minister.

The Moscow Times » Opinion

Issue 3899 | 12 May 2008

Op-Ed Contributor: The Danger of Isolationism
By Andrei Kortunov Russia has only two allies -- its army and navy."" This phrase, which was originally uttered 150 years ago by Tsar Alexander III, has become quite popular over the past several years to describe Moscow's shortage of allies.

Richard Lourie: Sinophobia
Russia is the only European country that borders China. That border is quite long (4,400 kilometers) and has a long and contentious history.

Mark H. Teeter: Medvedev the Bookworm
Forty years ago, a question of debate among American undergraduates was ""What tells you more about your dormmates -- their bookshelves or their record collections?"" Today's students probably ask ""their web Favorites or their iPods?"" -- or some other hi-tech pairing that ignores ""dead-tree books.""

Matthew Collin: Taking the Temperature In Georgia's Hot Spring
Tbilisi is bathing in an early summer glow. Babushkas are hawking bucketfuls of luscious strawberries and kiwi on the sidewalks, the fountains are gushing merry jets of water into the warm air, and the Georgian capital seems to be in a carefree mood. Is this really a country on the brink of war?

Issue 3898 | 8 May 2008

Editorial: Empower Medvedev
With Vladimir Putin's expected confirmation as prime minister on Thursday, both he and President Dmitry Medvedev, inaugurated Wednesday, will have new jobs.

The Day of the Bear
By Yevgeny Kiselyov President Dmitry Medvedev has a very Russian surname, one derived from one of the more prominent symbols of Russia -- the medved, or bear. Bears have served as the heroes of fairy tales, fables, proverbs and anecdotes, and they are depicted on the coat of arms of many Russian cities. A bear named Misha was the official mascot of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, and a bear is now the symbol of United Russia, which controls an absolute majority of seats in the State Duma.

Remembering Victory Day in a Different Way
By David Marples May 9 marks the 63rd anniversary of Victory Day, the day that Stalin set aside to commemorate the end of the World War II in Europe. The fighting had ended by May 5, and the Western allies accepted Germany's surrender three days later. But the Soviet Union opted to recognize the following day. Victory Day, as its name suggests, was intended originally to celebrate the Soviet victory over fascism. Today, it is used to remember those who took part in the greatest conflict in history and those who sacrificed their lives in the Red Army. Very few of them remain alive today.

Issue 3897 | 7 May 2008

Editorial: Stop Playing With Fire In Abkhazia
The ""frozen conflict"" between Georgia and Abkhazia is glowing red-hot again. Until recently, Georgia on one side and Abkhazia and its not-so-tacit patron, Russia, on the other had constrained themselves to belligerent rhetoric.

Yulia Latynina: How to Invent Enemies and a Strong Russia
Who is Mr. Putin? Until 2003, he was a leader who could have made Russia a truly great country if he followed through on his liberal economic program.

Op-Ed Contributor: No Softer Than Putin
By Rose Gottemoeller Dmitry Medvedev is being inaugurated as president at a fascinating time. For one thing, so many of his colleagues in the world leadership are moving up, down or out. Among the Group of Eight countries alone, the trend is remarkable.

Op-Ed Contributor: Warning Shot From Russia?
By Anne Applebaum Before it happened, nobody imagined that the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo would set off World War I. Before the ""shot heard round the world"" was fired, I doubt that 18th-century Concord expected to go down in history as the place where the American Revolution began.

Issue 3896 | 6 May 2008

Op-Ed Contributor: Rebranding Gazprom
By Chris Weafer The transfer of presidential power to Dmitry Medvedev will likely mark a turning point in how the world views Gazprom. For much of the last four years, Gazprom has been viewed with suspicion mixed with frustration as approval for projects to increase the country's energy exports were often delayed.

Alexei Pankin: High-Stakes Soap Opera
In my March 11 column, I predicted that there will be a continuation in the relationship between President-elect Dmitry Medvedev and Rossia state television news anchor Konstantin Syomin.

Alexander Golts: A Fight for Peace in Georgia
There won't be a global war, but there will be a global battle for peace so heated that it won't leave a single stone unturned."" I am reminded of this Soviet-era joke in light of the conflict among Georgia, Abkhazia and Russia.

Issue 3895 | 5 May 2008

Russia's New Strategic Industry
By Richard Ferguson A decade ago, the public perception of the agriculture industry was one of subsidies, trade distortions and rigged markets. More recently, public awareness has focused on concerns over food security, price inflation and even shortages.

Vladimir Frolov: Georgia Is Medvedev's First Foreign Policy Test
Whether by a calculated design or an unintended chain of events spinning out of control, President-elect Dmitry Medvedev will have a foreign policy crisis on his hands when he officially takes office on Wednesday.

Boris Kagarlitsky: Communism's New Crisis
A decade ago, the triumph of liberalism in Europe was so overwhelming that even parties that traced their political lineage to the early 20th-century revolutionary working class movement did not to speak openly about the radical transformation of society.

Alexei Bayer: Remaining a Moral Victor
In the 1970s, Alexander Solzhenitsyn hoped that Russia would be cleansed by its suffering under communism and eventually emerge as a beacon for other nations, leading the West toward moral regeneration.

Issue 3894 | 30 Apr 2008

Yulia Latynina: How to Conquer Georgia
Over the weekend, Foreign Ministry official Valery Kenyaikin cautioned Georgia against using NATO forces to resolve the territorial conflicts in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, saying Moscow would take ""all possible measures to protect its citizens if fighting broke out"" in these areas.

Op-Ed Contributor: A New Style of Turncoat
By James Bamford During much of the Cold War, the typical U.S. spy -- spy for the enemy, that is -- was a single, native-born, high-school-educated white male in his 20s, employed by a branch of the military and with top-secret security clearance.

Issue 3893 | 29 Apr 2008

Nothing Weird About Orthodox Tradition
By Vladimir Berezansky Jr. Together with the rest of the Eastern Christian world, the Russian Orthodox Church celebrated Easter on Sunday. In English, Orthodox Christians refer to Easter as ""Pascha,"" a word related to the English adjective ""paschal"" and to the French Paque or Italian Pasqua.

Easy Come, Easy Go Among Governors
By Nikolai Petrov During the Stalin years there was the notion of intensifying class struggle. Now we are observing an intensifying clan struggle as part of the Kremlin's policy of managed democracy, which, it would seem, has become quite overmanaged. This policy is particularly evident with governors, who have essentially become federal bureaucrats after President Vladimir Putin began appointing them.

Konstantin Sonin: The Upside of High Food Prices
The rapid rise in food prices has caused unrest in the developing world and near panic in the developed world. People are talking about a looming deficit, the suffering of people in the poorest countries and the need for speedy humanitarian aid.

Issue 3892 | 28 Apr 2008

Sham Inauguration Rocks!
By Mark H. Teeter If American voters are discouraged by a seemingly endless and increasingly hyperbolic presidential campaign -- now called ""The Campaign That Would Not Die"" by some and disparaged last week by The New York Times as ""meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering"" as it drags on -- they might want to consider what Russian voters have had to put up with after the formidably brief and utterly unhyperbolic presidential campaign here.

A Room in a City With A Fast-Changing View
By Matthew Collin Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, welcomed back one of its most famous families last week as a descendant of the Nobel brothers returned to the city where his ancestors made huge fortunes during the Caspian Sea oil boom more than a century ago.

Op-Ed Contributor: Russia's Pre-Olympic Nightmare
By Garry Kasparov The international community is justly concerned about China's crackdown in Tibet in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.

Richard Lourie: White Paper Blacked Out
In February, Boris Nemtsov published a white paper on the Vladimir Putin years that he considered so inflammatory that he suspended his membership in Union of Right Forces, the party he co-founded, to spare it the Kremlin's ire.

Issue 3891 | 25 Apr 2008

Letters: Cold War Culture, Russophobia and Stupidity
Your letters

Michele A. Berdy: Spring Weather Brings Spring Illnesses
Over my years of living in Moscow, I have come to embrace a number of Russian cultural concepts. I accept superstition as a viable lifestyle. I believe that all plastic bags should be saved until the end of time. I check the sunspot activity forecast before leaving the house. And I'm beginning to think that весеннее обострение -- the belief that all mental and physical processes go kerflooey in the spring -- might exist.

Reinventing Energy
By Jeffrey D. Sachs The world economy is being battered by sharply higher energy prices. While Russia and OPEC countries are reaping huge profits, the rest of the world is suffering as the price of oil has topped $110 per barrel and that of coal has doubled.

Issue 3890 | 24 Apr 2008

Georgy Bovt: Equating Holodomor With Genocide
This spring marks an anniversary that Russia will not commemorate. In fact, Moscow will make a point of ignoring it, as if the event had never happened. I am speaking of Holodomor, in which millions died of starvation in Ukraine, the Northern Caucasus and the Volga region in the spring of 1933. The famine began earlier, but reached its peak during those months. This year is the 75th anniversary of Holodomor, and Kiev will honor its victims as it has done in prior years.

Issue 3889 | 23 Apr 2008

There Is Nothing Normal About Corruption
By Anders Aslund In 2004, Foreign Affairs published a seminal article by professors Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman, arguing that Russia was a ""normal country""

Yulia Latynina: Kadyrov Is the Better of Two Chechen Evils
Modern Chechnya, like France under Louis XIV, is going through the final stage of its centralization. The latest victim in that process is the Vostok battalion commanded by Sulim Yamadayev.

Editorial: 3 Years Doesn't Fit the Crime in Miles Case
Judges from the Golovinsky District Court have probably presided over quite a few puzzling cases in their careers.

Op-Ed Contributor: The Real Joe McCarthy
By Ronald Kessler Fifty-four years ago Tuesday, U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy started his televised hearings on alleged Soviet spies and communists in the U.S. Army.

Issue 3888 | 22 Apr 2008

Avoiding Military Reforms
By Alexander Golts The word ""military reform"" sends terrible chills down the spines of military officers because it could mean that their alternative sources of income in the shadow economy will dry up or, even worse, that they will lose their jobs outright.

Op-Ed Contributor: High Time to Weaken Gazprom's Grip on EU
By Financial Times If the European Union needed a new warning of Russia's efforts to strengthen its grip on the continent's gas supplies, it has come in the shape of President Vladimir Putin's trip to Libya.

Editorial: A Disturbing Story of Leaks and Fantasies
We may never know what exactly prompted the relatively unknown daily tabloid Moskovsky Korrespondent to publish a salacious article claiming that President Vladimir Putin had left his wife and planned to marry Alina Kabayeva, a 24-year-old former Olympic champion in rhythmic gymnastics.

Alexei Pankin: A Perilous Tale of 2 Lions and Lots of Jackals
The Times of London ran an article last week quoting computer programmer Sergei Shpilkin as saying more than one-third of the votes cast for Dmitry Medvedev during the presidential election may have been falsified.

Op-Ed Contributor: Cold but Profitable
By Andrew Cahn Imagine a huge and diverse country bordering the European Union yet spanning 11 time zones -- one with a developing and dynamic market, an annual growth rate of about 7 percent over the last eight years and a growing and increasingly affluent middle class.

Issue 3887 | 21 Apr 2008

Deciphering Putin's New Role as Leader
By Vladimir Frolov President Vladimir Putin's appointment as United Russia head sends conflicting signals about how Russia will be ruled after May 7.

Op-Ed Contributor: Echoes of the Anschluss in Georgia
By Mart Laar President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday accelerated Moscow's creeping annexation of Georgian territories to sweeping annexation.

Alexei Bayer: The Lovely Smell of U.S. Stagnation
It has become a cliche to point out that the government is busy reviving various ideological and symbolic trappings of the Soviet Union.

Issue 3886 | 18 Apr 2008

Editorial: The Dangers of Crossing a Strongman
The conflict that boiled over this week between Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov and a powerful rival clan highlights some troubling logic in the Kremlin's pacification of Chechnya in recent years.

Michele A. Berdy: How to purge those strange, servile bums
One of the useless talents that translators develop is the ability to read a bad translation and know exactly what the original text was.

Op-Ed Contributor: Creating a New CPSU
By Vladimir Ryzhkov No matter what new party we create, in the end, it always turns out to be the Communist Party of the Soviet Union!""

Issue 3885 | 17 Apr 2008

The BRIC Globalizers
By Harold James The winners of the great globalization push of the 1990s were small states, such as New Zealand, Chile, Dubai, Finland, Ireland, the Baltic countries, Slovenia and Slovakia. The East Asian tigers that pushed themselves onto the world economy's center stage were small units, and in some cases -- Singapore, Taiwan, or Hong Kong -- were not even treated as states. Even South Korea, which is a giant in comparison, was only half a country.

Boris Kagarlitsky: Green With NATO Envy
""How interesting!"" These were the words of an airport security officer as he lifted a folder from my suitcase printed with the name of a conference titled, ""Fascism: Familiar Enemy or New Threat?"" He opened the folder, hoping to read its contents, but he was a bit disappointed to learn that I was only using the folder to hold miscellaneous papers.

Issue 3884 | 16 Apr 2008

Op-Ed Contributor: Rethinking Spheres of Influence
By Gideon Rachman In Winston Churchill's memoirs, he records a meeting with Josef Stalin in October 1944: ""The moment was apt for business, so I said 'Let us settle our affairs in the Balkans. ... So far as Britain and Russia are concerned, how would it do for you to have 90 percent predominance in Romania, for us to have 90 percent of the say in Greece and go 50-50 about Yugoslavia?'

Yulia Latynina: Making a Killing by Selling Weapons
We liberals have been wrongfully slandering the state for its attacks on various businesses.

An Early Assessment of Putin's Foreign Policy
By Fyodor Lukyanov President Vladimir Putin's participation in the NATO summit in Bucharest and his talks with U.S. President George W. Bush in Sochi marked the final foreign policy episode in his two terms.

Issue 3883 | 15 Apr 2008

A Regional Shift in Moscow
By Nikolai Petrov This is a first for Russia: We have a president-elect even while his predecessor continues to discharge his duties. Also new: President Vladimir Putin, unlike predecessor Boris Yeltsin, has no plans to fade into political obscurity.

Konstantin Sonin: A Shift in Authority
In December, when it became clear that President Vladimir Putin planned to transfer his office to First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and then himself move to the post of prime minister, the plan immediately raised some serious doubts.

Issue 3882 | 14 Apr 2008

You Aren't Where You Went
By Mark H. Teeter If the ides of March spelled trouble for Julius Caesar, mid-April makes millions of Americans wary -- and without knives or men in togas. The gainfully employed must lock 'n' load their No. 2 pencils for the annual showdown with the Internal Revenue Service (guess who wins), while high school seniors face an even more fateful reckoning: By April 15, the annual college admissions sweepstakes is finally over, and students must decide where to start the rest of their lives in the fall.

Silencing Protest With Balloons and Concerts
By Matthew Collin From my balcony in the center of Yerevan, the Armenian capital, I heard a sudden volley of bangs, as flashes of light illuminated the evening sky. A few weeks earlier, I'd been standing in the same place as the crackle of tracer bullet fire resounded in the night. Some people called this ""Bloody Saturday,"" as nine people were killed in pitched battles as riot police put down protests against Serzh Sargsyan's disputed presidential election victory. But this time, the explosions were celebratory -- a display of fireworks ending the day last week when Sargsyan was sworn in to office. This time, nobody died.

It's Not All About High Oil Prices
By Yaroslav Lissovolik The key economic priority in Russia is to maintain the high economic growth rates that it has achieved over the past eight years, and recent growth performance has certainly been encouraging. There are reasons to believe that this growth will remain high despite further shocks from global financial turbulence. This is due to the shift in the country's development from fragmentation to integration. The repatriation of capital and labor resources, the decrease in the size of the shadow economy and the country's increased role in the global economy are prominent examples of the country's integration, all of which played a major role in its post-1998 growth performance. This ""integration theory"" challenges the traditional view that high oil prices were the predominant reason for the country's economic expansion.

Richard Lourie: Those Ukrainian, Iranian NATO Blues
On the surface, it seems Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin each got what they wanted most at the NATO and Sochi summits. Bush is moving forward with the placement of anti-Iranian missiles in Poland, and Putin kept Ukraine out of NATO, at least for the time being.

Issue 3881 | 11 Apr 2008

Editorial: Private Sector Is Best Engine for Growth
Russian Railways has expressed an interest in bidding for the huge Udokan copper field in Siberia. This is another example of how the government's economic policy is increasingly shifting from free-market reforms to the creation of gigantic, state-controlled ""national champions.""

Op-Ed Contributor: The Language of Lust, Love and Cheating
By Michele A. Berdy As part of my Spring Self-Improvement Plan, I thought I would make my way through sem' smertnykh grehov (seven deadly sins). Let me restate that. I thought I'd read about the seven deadly sins in order to better avoid them. I did zavist' (envy). Next on my list: Pohot' (lust). This sounds like more fun. But there's a problem. In order to understand the Russian words for this particular sin, I've had to read reams of detailed definitions and descriptions, which has kept me wallowing in that which I pledged to avoid. So that you will not fall into this trap, here's a short primer on the most interesting sin.

Georgian Spring
By Gregory Dubinsky NATO's decision not to offer Georgia an immediate path to membership appears at first glance to be a blow to Washington. Although the NATO secretary-general announced that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members, Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, confidently predicted that nothing would change anytime soon.

Issue 3880 | 10 Apr 2008

Editorial: Photo Ops and Back Patting Aren't Enough
After weeks of predictions -- and great expectations -- on both sides of the ocean that Presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin would sign a strategic document in Sochi, the two leaders walked away with only one document titled ""U.S.-Russia Strategic Declaration.""

Need More Soft Power
By Mikhail Margelov Following the NATO summit in Bucharest and the Bush-Putin talks in Sochi, Russia's relations with the alliance and the United States remain about the same as they were prior to those meetings. It makes sense then that the most popular description of the summit has been: no breakthroughs, but some progress.

Georgy Bovt: Why Moscow Doesn't Have a Lot of Friends
Some members of Moscow's political establishment considered the recent NATO summit in Bucharest a partial victory since Georgia and Ukraine were not invited to join the alliance. But far from saying ""no,"" NATO promised that these countries would eventually become members.

Issue 3879 | 9 Apr 2008

Op-Ed Contributor: Is NATO Expansion Bad for Russia?
By Uffe Ellemann-Jensen Andrei Liakhov Russia's main argument against NATO enlargement is that it would threaten its security. That is nonsense, and Russia knows it.

Yulia Latynina: Fair-Weather Generals
The Kremlin has designed its power vertical in such a way that any public complaint against the government is considered a sign of disloyalty.

Predicting the End of the Commodity Bubble
By Martin Gilman For once in history, Russia appears to be on the right side of a global price trend.

Issue 3878 | 8 Apr 2008

Op-Ed Contributor: Why Food Costs So Much
By Paul Krugman These days you hear a lot about the world financial crisis. But there's another world crisis under way -- and it's hurting a lot more people.

Op-Ed Contributor: West's Criticism, Not NATO, Worries Putin
By Alexander Golts Imagine that a person decides to pose as a 19th-century Russian nobleman. He wears a long coat, walks with a cane and lets his sideburns grow long.

Alexei Pankin: A Funny Thing Before Medvedev's Forum
I recently got a call from the organizing committee of the Russian Internet Forum, where I had been accredited as the editor of a magazine covering business on the Internet.

Issue 3877 | 7 Apr 2008

Putin's Mixed Signals Sidelining Medvedev
By Vladimir Frolov Many in the West believe that Vladimir Putin has become a dictator and has found in Dmitry Medvedev a convenient seat holder while he himself will rule as prime minister once he steps down. I do not think this is Putin's intention. But appearances matter, and they might be misleading. Indeed, some of Putin's recent actions could be viewed as proof of his desire to remain not only influential but dominant after he formally transfers power to Medvedev on May 7.

Alexei Bayer: Lessons for Bush in the Afghan War
War, goes a Russian joke, is a means by which Americans learn geography. Funny -- but also very much on target. Having discovered the location of Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush seems eager to learn more about Iran.

Issue 3876 | 4 Apr 2008

Op-Ed Contributor: The New Nuclear Risks
By Joschka Fischer Humans love to suppress abstract dangers. They react only after they get their fingers burned. In handling nuclear risks, however, we can hardly get away with such childlike behavior.

Michele A. Berdy: Putting Up With All of That Noise
Ah, spring. The sound of birds chirping in the morn -- What? What did you say? Can you speak a little louder? I can't hear you! Hello?! Huh? Please speak up! Say what? Louder!

Op-Ed Contributor: Not All American Adoptive Parents Are Abusive
Your Letters

Issue 3875 | 3 Apr 2008

Editorial: New Chance to Make the Roads Safer
If any country has a record of poor road safety, it is certainly Russia. Perhaps this is what qualifies Russia to host a landmark conference on the issue next year.

Boris Kagarlitsky: A Labor Code in Bad Need of Revision
The labor movement has been making a lot of headlines lately. Workers at multinational companies were the first to strike for higher wages, but now the conflict has spread to Russian firms as well. For example, in mid-March, workers at the KamAZ automotive construction plant -- the former flagship of Soviet industry -- walked out on their jobs, and by the end of the month, bauxite miners in the Urals were also striking.

The Russophobia Card
By Andrei Tsygankov The U.S. presidential candidates are increasingly playing the Russophobia card in their campaigns. In addressing Russia, Senators John McCain and Hillary Clinton have resorted to insulting President Vladimir Putin as a KGB spy who has no soul. Russophobia is truly back into fashion, as Senator Joseph Biden admitted last week in a comment published in The Wall Street Journal.

Issue 3874 | 2 Apr 2008

Op-Ed Contributor: Will Moscow's Real Estate Bubble Burst?
By James Brooke Alexei Bayer This spring, prime office rents in Moscow are going above $2,000 a square meter, 50 percent higher than rents paid for offices in the ""trophy"" skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.

: Using the Orange Revolution to Raid TNK-BP
Things are definitely not going well for TNK-BP these days. Plainclothes police officers raided the company's headquarters on March 19, and a Russian-American employee and his brother were arrested on industrial espionage charges.

The Price Russia Must Pay for Being Hysterical
By Yevgeny Kiselyov Will Russia's fierce opposition to possible NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia force the alliance to withhold its official invitation to these two current members of the Commonwealth of Independent States when the NATO summit opens in Bucharest on Wednesday?

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