Several developments over the past weeks concerning Russia have had a little impact on the blogsphere but what seems to be going on in Russia has put it and the USA on parallel tracks, heading towards oligarchies where the few wealthy will buy the votes of the electorate as a nod towards democracy. While this comparison may seem outrageous, let me develop a few themes and you will start to see how close the two countries are becoming.
First, let’s be clear, Russia has abandoned its experiment with democracy. For the ordinary Russian it merely represents the opportunities given to a criminal class to obtain great wealth at their expense. They have seen their cost of living escalate while the state benefits such as pensions have been frozen, as indeed recently have many of the recipients. What the typical Russian voter wants is a strong leader who they believe will stand up for them and in Putin they appeared to have got one. In reality he has entered into an unholy alliance with the oligarchs and shows every intention of becoming one once his final term as President is up. Are the echoes with the US starting? Replace the individual oligarchs with big business or even specifically “Halliburton” and you understand better.
Many on here will be familiar with the ways in which the current US administration has been attacking dissent as “un-American”. The First Ammendment of course means that people will continue to express their objections to the system but who will listen? Rational debate has been replaced by “faith based politics” in all its senses.
Now in Russia there have been specific developments over the past few days that show just how the ruling elite in Ruaaia is prepared to go in controlling the media and is doing it now using many of the same techniques as the neocons. Previously Putin had closed or supressed media, especially television, which expressed opposition to him. Part of this was done by enforcing his deal with the oligarchs. They would not be subject to investigation of how they very quickly acquired their assets if they did not indulge in politics. The biggest of the oligarchs are of course those who control the oil and gas industries. Going against Putin has dire consequences as a new demand for $4 billion in taxes from Yukos illustrates:
Formerly Russia’s largest oil group, Yukos has been bought to its knees in recent years after the Kremlin ordered it to pay back taxes totalling $28bn.
That was to cover the years 2000 to 2003, while the new demand is for 2004.
Russian authorities say Yukos used illegal loopholes to avoid tax, while the firm says it has been victimised.
Yukos and its supporters say the firm was simply punished for the pro-Western political ambition of its founder and former boss Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
Mr Khodorkovsky, who was also Russia’s richest man, is serving an eight-year sentence for tax evasion and fraud.
Of course you can still induge your ego in local politics if you do not rock the boat in Moscow. Roman Abramovich is best known in the west as the billionaire owner of Chelsea Football(soccer) Club. In Russia he got his money through is ownership of Sibneft, an oil company and started his second term as governor of Chukotka in October last year. Chukotka is a barren and bankrupt region of Russian and forms the very tip of Siberia pointing towards Alaska. Abramovich has put large amounts of his own money into supporting the local economy but rather than altruism this subsidy should rather be looked at as a sort of tax levied on his oil activities. Abramovich (literally “son of Abraham” or “Abramoff”) appears to have gained his wealth by good connections with both Boris Yeltsin who privatised Sibneft and Putin who at the time was head of the FSB, the sucessor to the KGB. Ironically these connections were through his mentor Khodorkovsky. The investigation into alleged irregularities in the dealings were cut short by the 1999 showing on TV of a “honey trap” video of the procecutor in bed with two women. That was after the Kremlin tried to sack him but the Parliament refused to confirm it and the video is widely believed to have been set up by the FSB. There are other suggestions that his being based in Chutotka also allowed him to take advantage of tax differences so as to considerably reduce Sibneft’s liabilities. Not many western media try to penetrate the veil of secrecy surrounding Anramovich’s early business dealings but this Guardian article goes deeper than most. He will have more time to concentrate on his Siberian and Chelsea interests, not to mention his large stock holdings in an aluminium company and Aeroflot, as Sibneft was sold to the state-owned gas monopoly Gazprom in october 2005.
That deal put all gas sales and one third of Russia’s considerable oil output under Kremlin control. Putin is thought to be angling for a job as head of Gazpom once he leaves the Presidency.
The fall of the Soviet Union is often put down to the effect on the economy of supporting a burgeoning military. The cost of keeping up in technogical term s with the USA was just too much to bear. Now Russia has discovered an even more effective means of control than its army and is already flexing it. No need to roll your tanks into the centre of a country’s capital when you can foster internal dissent by disrupting the supply of gas. Just that happened over the New Year when Ukraine was punished for its “Orange Revolution” by Gazprom demanding an enormous increase to a high open market price compared to the deal reached when it was a Soviet Republic. Whether this was actually punishing Ukraine or just showing it power in controlling the economies of many EU countries is open to debate. Certainly Ukraine had a trump card as the pipelines to the west crossed its territory so the only way Russia could completely stop their supply was to cut off their own income from the EU.
The gas/oil weapon has also been wielded against those other organge revolutionaries, the Georgians. Their gas price had been increased and agreed but there was an ongoing disoute over oil and gas pipelines through Georgia to Turkish ports and other gas pipeline networks. Somehow last week both the gas pipeline and an electricity line were blown up in Russian controlled border regions, virtually eliminating the heating for most Georgians in the middle of an unusually cold winter.
If the Kremlin is trying to bring its former satellites back to heel, it is also attempting to further eliminate dissent within as another incident over the weekend shows. The story of the 4 British embassy employees alleged to be spying in Moscow and getting information via a “clever rock” has been reported mostly as a sort of James Bond escapade in the western press. The Russian coverage shows what might well be the true reason for a Kremlin controlled TV station showing surveillance footage that could only have come from the FSB. This report in Pravda demonstrates what might well be the true reason for the publicity.
According to the official, the device was designed as a stone, outfitted with a transmitter inside. Footage taken from hidden cameras showed what the programme claimed were British officers walking past the boulder and surreptitiously downloading classified data onto palmtop computers. It also showed what were said to be local agents approaching the stone apparently to upload instructions for their top-secret missions. Unfortunately for the alleged spies, the rock’s wiring was faulty. In one episode, an agent was filmed pretending to relieve himself in shrubs as he fiddled with its sophisticated electronics. In another, the rugby-ball sized stone was picked up and carried away for repairs.
Spokespeople for Russian special services said that it was the latest know-how of the British intelligence. It took FSB agents several months to conduct the operation, which eventually ended with an arrest of four employees of the British embassy. There was a Russian citizen detained within the scope of the operation.
Once the FSB agents detected the stone-like transmitter, Russian special services started searching for similar boulders all over Moscow. “The search was a success. We found another stone,” an FSB official said.
There are thousands of non-governmental organizations working in present-day Russia. However, only 92 of them are officially registered in the Ministry for Justice. The majority of them were established under the guidance of governmental and public organizations of the USA and its NATO allies.
The “spies” were named as Christopher Pirt, a researcher at the British embassy in Moscow, Paul Cronton, an embassy employee, Marc Doe, a First Secretary, and Andrew Fleming, a researcher.
FSB officers demonstrated several payment orders proving the transmittance of thousands of pounds sterling. The documents were signed by Marc Doe, a First Secretary of the British Embassy in Moscow, the political department. “The money was flowing every day. Here is a line that says that the payment has been made in cash. It was a targeted payment for the project to establish a network of public inspectors’ schools in remote districts of Northern Siberia and the Far East. One may only guess what kind of inspectors they will be and what they will supervise,” an official said.
The journalists working on the above-mentioned TV program said that the US Secretary of State released quite a significant statement, which added an ironic note to the spy scandal between Russia and Britain. On December 7, 2005 Condoleezza Rice criticized Russia for the law about non-governmental organizations. Rice expressed the concerns of the US administration and said that the USA would like Russia to understand the importance of NGOs.
As you will see, far more emphasis on the NGOs funded by the west with the implication that they are working against the interests of Mother Russia. Attacks on independent groups who might criticise the policies of the central government. As I said this aspect has had little coverage apart from perhaps inevitably by the BBC. This story even indicates there may have been a bungled attempt to present a forgery as damning evidence (now where have we heard that before?)
Ms Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, said they(the allegations) were part of a campaign against Kremlin critics, linked to a law tightening control over NGOs which President Vladimir Putin signed this month.
“They are preparing public opinion for a government move to close us down, which they can now do under the new law,” she told reporters.
She said a document written in Russian which showed one of the alleged spies’ signatures was a fake. All communication between her organisation and British donors was in English, according to Ms Alexeyeva.
The Pravda website gets nearer to the truth in this report on the proposed NGO control law:
The Committee to Protect Journalists called on Russian President Vladimir Putin not to sign a new bill that would severely restrict non-governmental organizations. In a letter dated Wednesday, the New York-based group criticized the bill, which has been approved by both houses of parliament, as “deeply flawed.” “The vaguely worded legal restrictions would empower politicized bureaucrats to interfere in the work of NGOs and derail democracy by denying citizens access to information about political and economic developments,” the committee’s director, Ann Cooper, wrote in the letter.
The bill’s sponsors said it is necessary to stem terrorism and extremism, but critics see the measure as part of a Kremlin campaign to increase control over society and stem dissent. The draft legislation provides for a new agency to oversee the registration, financing and activities of Russia’s more than 400,000 NGOs. It would require stringent, continual accounting before the government, which NGOs worry would draw too many staff and resources from their real work.
The new agency, the Federal Registration Service, and not the courts would determine if an NGO should be dissolved. “NGOs are concerned that the vague wording in the bill grants excessive authority to the Federal Registration Service to enforce the provisions in a selective way against organizations seen as disloyal the Kremlin,” the committee said.
It noted that the bill comes at a sensitive time in Russia, in the run-up to parliamentary elections in 2007 and the presidential vote the following year, and appears aimed at denting political pluralism. “As a press freedom organization, we are deeply troubled that the bill will be used to interfere in news reporting in Russia, where excessive government secrecy has forced journalists to increasingly rely on NGOs for information about government polices and public opinion,” the letter said, reports the AP.
So we have two governmnts led by people with an intimate involvement in their country’s oil/gas industries trying to suppress dissent. Both are using the threat of outsiders and terrorism to justify it. Both are using their intelligence services to produce dubious information fed to a compliant press. The aim in all of this of course is to ensure that they stay in power to protect their own interests and promote their own agendas (this is explicit in the case of the neocons in the US. Both turn a blind eye to the expolitation of tax systems by plutocrats intent on avoiding paying a fair share of tax and both are indifferent to the suffering this causes to the general population. Both are brought off by big donations, in Abramovich’s case it is his supposed subsidy to an underdeveloped area and in Abramoff’s case it is kickbacks paid for by Indian tribes.
What they share is greed, lust for power at all cost and a disregard for the principles of democracy.