Tomas Hirst
The Kremlin has decided to take a strong stance against Iran’s enrichment programme
China’s unwillingness to support sanctions against Iran may preoccupy the international community, but the discussion ignores a key development: the lack of a Russian obstacle.
To put the situation in perspective, Russia has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, estimated to be in the region of 16,000 (although the Start II Treaty limits the number of operational warheads to 4250). It also has a traditional hostility towards America’s aggressive foreign policy and a vested interest in keeping US/Iranian relations frosty in order to knock out a major competitor in oil production.
Along with China, it has forced a watering down of three previous attempts at sanctions against Ahmadinejad’s regime. Their combined resistance to tough international measures has left many feeling that, to date, sanctions have been largely toothless.
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Tomas Hirst
Dmitry Medvedev and Vladimir Putin
The Russian Duma’s overwhelming vote to ratify Protocol 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights could force the hand of the government to reform the country’s legal system.
Long promised under Vladimir Putin, the reform of Russia’s opaque justice system has been a topic of open debate for more than a decade. Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s successor to the presidency, even made it a key component to his televised interview at the end of last year.
In it he announced in no uncertain terms that “our system of the execution of punishment has not changed for decades,” and suggested the need to change was immediate. The response, both nationally and internationally, was understandably muted: this is now a well-worn promise in a country where the conviction rate for criminal cases without a jury has hovered at around 99 per cent.
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Tomas Hirst
Russian swagger: turning off the pipes
News that Russia has suspended oil shipments to Belarus should give the rest of Europe cause for concern. It shows that more than ever before the country is willing to use its commodities leverage to ensure cooperation, even of its allies.
The collapse of commodities prices in July 2008 illustrated the true vulnerability of the Russian economic growth story: in the second half of 2008 the price of crude oil fell from almost $150 a barrel to under $33 a barrel, forcing the government to take a huge chunk out of its currency reserves to stave off a rouble collapse.
While the fall was almost catastrophic, it appears to have done little to dampen Russia’s swagger, which is riding comfortably once more following the sharp snapback of commodities prices. Like the gas dispute between Russia and the Ukraine in January 2009, Belarus is a further example of the negotiating technique employed by the Putin government—a stark warning that the country is once again willing to rile friend and foe alike to achieve its goals.
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Tomas Hirst
Russia's powerful prime minister has more to gain from keeping Medvedev in tow
Following Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in session, a veritable flurry of articles have appeared effectively declaring his candidacy for the 2012 presidential election. Yet I still feel that this is unlikely.
As journalists looking at Russia from our western pedestal, it’s all too easy to see intrigue and infighting without having to try (or think) too hard. “Look!” we say, “Putin won’t deny that he’s going to run.” And in the umbrella-stabbing world of intrigue that is Russian politics this surely means he’s going for President Dmitri Medvedev’s jugular.
Yet here’s a more pertinent question to ask: why would he declare himself out of an election that is still, in terms of recent developments in the Russian political landscape, an age away? He is the most powerful politician in the country, and singlehandedly (sorry Dmitri) drove the party United Russia to victory in the parliamentary elections last year. Without him, or faced with the prospect of being without him come 2012, his party’s position, along with the president’s, would be greatly weakened. And as history has shown, perceived weakness and division is nearly always punished by democratic electorates.
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Evgeny Morozov
Read more in this debate: media guru, Clay Shirky, responds to Morozov’s criticisms and defends the web as a positive force for democracy. Morozov replies to Shirky here.
Hear more: Evgeny Morozov speaks at Demos on the subject: “Is the internet really changing politics?”, and Prospect’s Tom Chatfield interviews Morozov here.
My homeland of Belarus is an unlikely place for an internet revolution. The country, controlled by authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko since 1994, was once described by Condoleezza Rice as “the last outpost of tyranny in Europe.”
Its last presidential election in March 2006 was followed by a short-lived and unsuccessful revolution. The initial protests were brutally suppressed. But where public rallies couldn’t succeed, protesters turned to more creative forms of insurgency: flash mobs. In a flash mob, social media or email is used to assemble a group of people in a public place, who then perform together a brief, often surreal action. Some young Belarusians used the blogging service LiveJournal to organise a series of events in Minsk with subtle anti-government messages. In a typical flash mob, the youngsters smiled, read newspapers or ate ice-cream. There was nothing openly political but the subtext was: “It’s better to lick ice-cream than the president’s ass!” The security services made many arrests, but their actions were captured in photos that were posted on LiveJournal and on photo-sharing websites like Flickr. Western bloggers and then traditional media picked up the news, drawing attention to the harsh crackdown.
Details of this rebellion have since been celebrated by a cadre of mostly western thinkers who believe that digital activism can help to topple authoritarian regimes. Belarusian flash mobs are invoked to illustrate how a new generation of decentralised protesters, armed only with technology, can oppose the state in ways unthought of in 1968 or 1989. But these digital enthusiasts rarely tell you what happened next.
Enthusiasm for the idea of digital revolution abounds. In October, I was invited to testify to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Washington DC—a hotchpotch of US congressmen, diplomats and military officials. The group was holding a hearing titled: “Twitter Against Tyrants: New Media in Authoritarian Regimes.” I would once have happily accepted the premise, but recently my thinking has changed. From 2006-08 I worked on western-funded internet projects in the former Soviet Union—most with a “let’s-promote-democracy-through-blogs” angle. But last year I quit. Our mission to use the internet to nudge citizens of authoritarian regimes to challenge the status quo had so many unexpected consequences that, at times, it seemed to be hurting the very causes we were trying to promote.
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Tomas Hirst
Demonstrations for NTV independence in Moscow, March 2001
Independent media organisations in Russia have faced a long and bitter struggle since they were forged in the chaos of the 1990s. Now, however, despite their efforts, they are the closest they have ever been to being silenced.
I am not talking about the operations of western media outlets in Russia over the past two decades, a boom which has seen Dow Jones, Reuters and Bloomberg newswires flourish. Foreign language newspapers such as the Moscow Times and the St Petersburg Times have also been established and largely treated with ambivalence by the Kremlin.
The point, of which the current Russian administration is acutely aware, is that they are not Russian businesses aimed at Russian people. While Hollywood has penetrated the cultural life of the country, the foreign news media is treated with distrust or even hostility. Read more »
Jonathan Power
Iran could become another Turkey: "democratic, pro-western and bomb free"
As the possibility of a UN-backed plan aimed at limiting Iran’s ability to make nuclear weapons has been given a glimmer of hope—in not being rejected outright by the Iranian government—it is worth considering why Iran is being singled out so acutely and unfairly over its nuclear policy.
Clearly, the west and Russia are engaged in discriminating against it. Brazil has had a nuclear-enrichment programme for decades (including a large ultracentrifuge enrichment plant, several laboratory-scale facilities, a reprocessing facility to make plutonium, and a missile programme). In the 1980s it built two nuclear devices.
Three years ago I asked the chief of mission at the US embassy in Brasilia if Washington was worried about Brazil. “Not at all,” he replied. “In the early 1990s Brazil dismantled its nuclear weapons’ programme, and Argentina, its supposed enemy, has done the same.” “But,” I insisted, “Brazil still has its enrichment programme and a reprocessing facility.” His answer: “We have no worries about Brazil. We see eye to eye.” However Brazil still resists, in part, the probing eye of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world’s nuclear watchdog.
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Tomas Hirst
Cult leader: the long process of de-Stalinization continues
We need to stop talking about political divisions in the heart of United Russia, and appreciate that Dmitry Medvedev’s speech against Stalin-era crimes is a truly brave step.
A brief visit to Red Square might leave many in the West confused; Stalin’s tomb, separated from Lenin’s only eight years after his death, remains one of the best decorated with tokens from his still enamoured supporters.
Let us not underestimate the scale to which he is still revered in the country. In December last year Josef Stalin was voted the third most popular Russian in a nationwide poll conducted on state television.
Seen by the West as a puppet of the former president and current prime minister, Vladimir Putin, Medvedev’s touching on a subject as sensitive as the heritage of such an emotive figure might seem alien to such a definition.
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CityBoy
Oily answers: Russia has not been not successful
Sorry to have been AWOL for a few weeks. I have in fact been delving into the world of the former Soviet bloc to see if indeed there is anything we can learn about recovering from a crisis.
Certainly Russia has had its fair share of hardship over the past 18 months—some would say an unduly large portion. With the Georgian conflict and the stand-off over the excitingly named Star Wars missile defence plan still fresh in the minds of many columnists, a healthy serving of humble pie was largely felt to be their just desserts.
The view from Russia, of course, is rather different. It was not, they say, their banks which indulged in the “merry-go-round” of CDSs and CDOs, or their financial regulators who sat, rubber stamp at the ready, as the magical mystery tour of complex financial products traipsed across their desks.
Nor, they holler, was it their consumers who were piling on the debt to pay for their Yves Saint Laurent clothing and full Rock Band sets. And they’re right, it wasn’t their fault.
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Archie Brown
To discuss this article visit First Drafts, Prospect ’s blog
Twenty years ago today in China the prolonged pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square was brought to a brutal end, when troops and tanks moved in and hundreds of people were killed on the streets of Beijing. While the western world remembers this event, it’s worth bearing in mind that June marks another, very different anniversary. Just 20 years ago democratic reforms in the Soviet Union also astonished the world. Contested elections brought into being the First Congress of People’s Deputies, held between 25 May and 9 June. From the outset, this was a legislature in which the executive was criticised and real debate took place. Its proceedings were televised live and watched by more than half the adult population.
In 1989 it looked as if Russia and China were travelling in opposite directions. What was then still the Soviet Union was moving towards democratic and accountable government. In China, radical economic reform had already made great progress, but the response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators of Deng Xiaoping (the father of the Chinese economic reform) was to impose martial law.
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