金融时报发长篇审判猛文：莫斯科的早晨、午后、傍晚和夜晚。

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/48b6a350-ad29-11e4-bfcf-00144feab7de.html#axzz3R1Gv5G6H

“早晨的莫斯科是寡头政治，午后的莫斯科是民主政治；到了吃晚饭时候的莫斯科是君主专制，上床睡觉时间的莫斯科是威权统治。”

恐怕是奥朗德和默克尔斡旋未果。西方传媒寡头吹响了新一轮妖魔化普京的号角。全球传媒寡头《金融时报》发长篇审判猛文，痛审普京乃沙皇再世。
信仰民族的思维好像是这样的：对任何事物都要审判是好与坏，美与丑，天使与恶魔。不进行审判的话，思考似乎就失去意义一样。

说实话，看完之后感觉词汇量在噌噌的往上涨。太猛了，太猛了，真的是在是在是太猛了！>0<

扯开说句题外话：
就在最近，看到一个白人红脖子知识泼妇，掘地三尺猛挖普京的原罪，然后写了本书。看了她的访谈，第一，我被她的执着给深深地折服了。第二，我被她的信仰程度给深深地折服了。第三，我被她的学术泼妇气质完全给折服了。

另外一个令我记忆犹新的是看到一个智库关于巴基斯坦内政与反恐presentation视频中，一个南亚问题研究的红脖子女教授，在问答环节对一个貌似非学者的巴基斯坦人，所提的一个带有一定巴官方宣传立场反美倾向的提问，所表现出来的措辞与口气野蛮程度，完全是一个成年人训斥一个小孩的口吻。it is absolutly mind blowing。当然，并非所有人都这样，但这种白人知识红脖子和知识泼妇，貌似还真不是一个两个。
就此打住，再说下去就不是兵谈讨论的话题了。

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Vladimir Putin and his tsar quality

John Thornhill
Russia has often been described as a failing democracy. But is it better understood as an authoritarian project in the process of succeeding?

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Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, by Peter Pomerantsev, Faber & Faber, RRP£14.99/Public Affairs, RRP$25.99, 284 pages

The late, great historian of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Leonard Schapiro, used to argue that of all the factors distinguishing democracies from autocracies, the most important was the rule of law.

The right to vote a self-serving government out of office was a wonderful privilege. Free speech, free markets and a free press were also to be cherished. But the ability of an individual successfully to defend his or her rights in a court of law — even against the predations of a government or ruling party — was the most precious freedom of all. “The law has always been and, I believe, always must be the acid test of a free society,” he wrote.

The three books on Russia reviewed here, although very different in focus, substance and style, have one thing in common: all highlight just how far Russia remains from Schapiro’s ideal. The country may exhibit some of the rudimentary trappings of a capitalist democracy, with a fair legal regime that in theory protects individuals’ rights. But rather than serving as a shield for the people, the law is in practice being wielded as a sword for the state.

Russian voters expected much of Vladimir Putin when he became president in 2000, following an anarchic decade of imperial break-up and economic chaos. The youthful former KGB lieutenant colonel promised to end rampant criminality, restore order and establish the “dictatorship of the law”. But according to these three authors, Putin has betrayed that promise. The experience of the past 15 years has shown that a privileged few remain unaccountable, most conspicuously the president himself.

As Karen Dawisha writes in Putin’s Kleptocracy, the unofficial slogan for his regime has become: “For my friends, anything. For my enemies, the law!”

A long-time Russia scholar who now teaches at Miami University, Dawisha spent almost eight years researching her book. Its title encapsulates her argument that Putin has turned Russia into a criminal state, by design rather than by default. Instead of viewing Putin’s Russia as a democracy in the process of failing (as has been common in the west), we should instead view it as an authoritarian project in the process of succeeding. “For [the] older generation of KGB veterans who suffered a temporary setback when the August 1991 coup failed, Putin represented the culmination of their ideological, ethnic, and institutional desire for revanche,” she writes.

Buoyed by the commodities boom in the early part of this century, Russia earned $1.6tn in oil and gas revenues between 2000 and 2011, leading to a rapid rise in average GDP per capita. During that time, Putin restored state capitalism, but with a difference. “The state nationalises the risk but continues to privatise the rewards to those closest to the president in return for their loyalty,” writes Dawisha. This has resulted in a vastly unequal economy in which 110 Kremlin-connected billionaires control 35 per cent of the country’s assets, 110,000 independent entrepreneurs languish in jail, and median household wealth in 2013 was just $871 in 2013, compared with $1,040 in India. The people experienced a repeat of the phenomenon first identified by the 19th-century historian Vasily Klyuchevsky: “The state grew fat while the people grew thin.”

As Karen Dawisha writes, the unofficial slogan for Putin’s regime has become: ‘For my friends, anything. For my enemies, the law!’

In studying high-level corruption under the Putin regime, Dawisha does a thorough job of analysing the relevant material in the historical archives and court records, and collating reports in the Russian and western press. The power of her argument is amplified by the coolness of her prose. Yet her scholarly analysis was still deemed too legally explosive by her original publisher, Cambridge University Press, which declined to proceed with the book for fear of the UK’s claimant-friendly libel laws. It has since been published in the US by Simon & Schuster.

In Dawisha’s account, Putin’s modus operandi was established while serving as deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg in the early 1990s. Then, he and a close-knit team of former KGB officers regulated all foreign economic activity into and out of Russia’s “window on the West”, developing close ties with organised crime, Dawisha asserts. “Putin’s style was a failure for the city because it suppressed initiative. But it was a victory for his clan. He would now bring that style and set of priorities to the country at large as he moved to Moscow.”

After being appointed prime minister by President Boris Yeltsin in 1999, Putin brutally suppressed the breakaway region of Chechnya, burnishing his electoral appeal as a nationalist hardman. Once elected president, he set about consolidating power. He stripped defiant oligarchs of their control over national television and threw Mikhail Khodorkovsky into jail, divvying up the assets of his Yukos oil group. He also took on the mighty Gazprom gas empire, installing his own man as chairman in 2001.

Dawisha ends the book by urging the west to wake up to the realities of Putin’s Russia, accusing western banks of being complicit in the support of kleptocracy. She applauds the targeting of Putin’s coterie by US sanctions in response to the Ukraine crisis as a belated recognition of those realities.

One man who has experienced the Kremlin’s darker side and has been instrumental in developing a targeted sanctions policy against Russia is Bill Browder, a hedge fund manager turned human rights activist. If Dawisha’s book is a clinical dissection of Putin’s regime, Browder’s Red Notice is an impassioned personal broadside against the Kremlin.

The first part of his book recounts his rollercoaster years as a US-born financier who moved to Moscow in the 1990s, built up the biggest foreign investment fund in Russia and was then thrown out of the country in 2005 after exposing systematic corporate corruption. Even in his own telling, Browder does not come across as a particularly sympathetic character. Sharp-elbowed and unsentimental, he knew little about Russia other than that it was a fabulous place to get rich. He cheered from the sidelines as Putin tamed the oligarchs and jailed Khodorkovsky, and was happy to make money wherever he could amid the corruption.

After analysing Gazprom’s accounts, Browder’s team estimated that managers had in effect siphoned off reserves equivalent to the size of Kuwait’s. “Full-scale wars had been fought over far less,” he writes. Nevertheless, Browder concluded that Gazprom’s undervalued shares remained a terrific buy because he knew that 90 per cent of its reserves had not been stolen. “What should an investor do in a situation like this? I’ll tell you what: you buy the shit out of that stock.”

For a while, Browder’s interests were aligned with those of the Kremlin: helping to expose the predations of the oligarchs. But he believes that once Putin and his friends had recaptured all the top assets, their interests diverged, resulting in his expulsion.

Browder’s world was turned upside down when one of his lawyers, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and jailed for almost a year after discovering evidence of a $230m tax scam by state officials. Denied medical treatment and beaten by police officers, Magnitsky died in prison in 2009.

Browder pays fitting tribute to a lawyer who was angered by the criminality he saw around him and was determined to do something about it. He was exactly the kind of cussed, courageous lawyer needed to defend freedoms in society. Ignoring pleas to flee Russia, Magnitsky had insisted on staying in Moscow and fighting his case. “The law will protect me. This isn’t 1937,” Magnitsky said, in reference to Stalin’s purges.

“He didn’t realize that Russia had no rule of law, it had a rule of men,” Browder writes. “Sergei Magnitsky was killed for his ideals. He was killed because he believed in the law. He was killed because he loved his people, and because he loved Russia. He was thirty-seven years old.”

Outraged by Magnitsky’s death, Browder vowed to bring those responsible for his murder to justice. With no chance of pursuing the case in Russia, Browder began lobbying western governments and parliaments to sanction those involved in his arrest, persecution and death. He was helped by the meticulous records that Magnitsky kept while in prison. As Browder observes, Russia may be a country with no respect for law, but it has a slavish adherence to bureaucratic procedure. In his 358 days in detention, Magnitsky and his lawyers filed 450 criminal complaints protesting against the violation of his rights, making it perhaps the most well-documented human rights case to come out of Russia in 35 years.

As a result of his extraordinary tenacity, Browder succeeded in achieving something that even the US president has struggled to do: persuading Congress to pass legislation. In 2012 the US Congress passed the Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act, enshrining a new method for fighting human rights abuses in authoritarian regimes in the 21st century: targeted visa sanctions and asset freezes. “What had started out as a Bill about Sergei had morphed into a historic piece of global human rights legislation,” Browder writes.

The Kremlin reacted with fury to Browder’s campaign and issued an Interpol Red Notice demanding his arrest and extradition. In 2013 it opened a trial against Browder, now based in London, as well as Magnitsky himself. “The last time a dead person had been prosecuted in Europe was in AD897, when the Catholic Church convicted Pope Formosus posthumously, cut off his papal fingers and threw his body into the River Tiber,” Browder notes acidly. In absentia, Browder was sentenced to nine years in prison. But that has not stopped him campaigning for European parliaments to adopt similar legislation.

 . . . 

The portrait of Putin that Dawisha and Browder paint is so damning that one wonders how any sane Russian voter could possibly support him. Yet even if Russian opinion polls are to be partly discounted, Putin evidently remains popular among many voters for restoring a sense of national pride.

Peter Pomerantsev helps explain this phenomenon in Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, his mesmerising account of the nine years he spent in Russia as a television producer. During that time, Pomerantsev recorded some remarkable human stories about life in modern Russia as well as observing first-hand the brilliant but cynical way that state television cast its spells over the population. The goal, as he put it, was to “synthesise Soviet control with Western entertainment”, turning Russia into a country of canned laughter.

Along the way, Pomerantsev recounts his meetings with retired gangsters put out of business by the predatory state, a successful businesswoman sucked into the criminal quicksand, glamorous models who fall prey to scary sects, and nationalist bikers called Night Wolves, who style themselves on the Hell’s Angels.

At the heart of this kaleidoscopic world stands Vladislav Surkov, the then Kremlin official hailed as one of the ideologues of “managed democracy”, who directs Russian society as if it were one giant reality show. The mercurial Surkov has helped create a “postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends”.

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The brilliance of this new system, Pomerantsev argues, is that it climbs inside all ideologies and movements and renders them absurd, making it impossible to know what to believe. “The Kremlin has finally mastered the art of fusing reality TV and authoritarianism to keep the great 140m-strong population entertained, distracted, constantly exposed to geopolitical nightmares that if repeated enough times can become infectious.

“Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state by bedtime,” he writes.

His book ends with a sense of foreboding as he returns to London to resume a more “normal” existence but sees signs of Moscow’s “triumphant cynicism” seeping into British life. As he knows from talking to the casualties of such a culture in Moscow, “The flipside of triumphant cynicism, of the ideology of endless shape-shifting, is despair.”

John Thornhill is deputy editor of the Financial Times and a former Moscow bureau chief



 

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