A Step At A Time

On Hogmanay, Andrew Sullivan is posting from Scotland, and has something to say about it:

20% of Scots see themselves as being primarily “British” - down from 38% in 1979. 78% of Scots now say “Scottish” “best describes” their nationality.

One example of this: the argument has moved on to what sort of Scotland we’d see post-independence. In one corner there are those like the exiled Scots historian Niall Ferguson who see a sad, shrivelled country that has abandoned even the memory of its glory years. Scotland, he quips, is “the Belarus of the west.”

Ferguson - like many Scots in exile views his native heath with great ambivalence (a sentiment not so often shared by exiles from other countries, in my experience). Certainly surveying the solidly-statist, rock-solid consensus that prevails in Scotland one’s forced to fear that there might be 20 years of appalling government before prosperity and progress returned. (The Scottish conservatives - who would fit solidly into the Democratic party in the United States - are considered dangerous radicals when, that is, anyone remembers to consider them at all.)

On the other hand, there are advantages (currently under threat) to be gained by living in Scotland, as this blog points out, quoting an op-ed article by Gerald Warner in Scotland on Sunday:

Labour proposes to use its control of Holyrood to demolish the defences of Scottish personal liberties and harmonise our laws with those of England, as in pre-devolution times. South of the Border, the DNA of 3.46 million people is stored in police records, the highest number in the world - more than in Putin’s Russia. That is an embryonic police state.

A Happy New Year to readers of A Step At A Time.

Labels: Belarus, Geopolitics, Human Rights, Russia, Scotland, United Kingdom

FAKT: Every terrorist you have named is from ‘the old staff’ of the KGB. Could you name someone from recent history?

A. Litvinenko: Certainly, here it is. The number two person in the terrorist organization al Qaeda, who they are crediting with the series of explosions in London, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an old agent of the FSB. Being sentenced to death in Egypt for terrorism and hunted by Interpol, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 1998, was in the territory of Dagestan, where for half a year he received special training at one of the educational bases of the FSB. After this training he was transferred to Afghanistan, where he had never been before and where, following the recommendation of his Lubyanka chiefs, he at once … penetrated the milieu of bin Laden and soon became his assistant in al Qaeda.

Carl Bildt, who in October became Sweden’s foreign minister in the new centre-rightist government of Fredrik Reinfeldt, has resumed posting to his blog.

A recent post links to Bildt’s speech (.doc) to the International Institute for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm earlier this month. The message of the speech is mixed, combining “optimism about the possibilities of globalisation with pessimism concerning the dark clouds gathering on the more immediate horizons of the neighbourhood of Europe.” Excerpt:

Being Minister for Foreign Affairs in Sweden today is not the same as it was yesterday.

We are living at the beginning of a major paradigm shift of our own. We are in the midst of a new phase of accelerating globalisation. We see the darkness at the edge of Europe’s strategic horizon. And we see how states are weaker and more tentative when confronted with all these new developments.

Naturally, national foreign policy still has a role to play. We have a role in developing cooperation in the Baltic Sea region and northern Europe, which will become ever more important. We must safeguard our national interests even in an age of internationalism.

But even so, these are not the crucial tasks.

The crucial tasks lie in strengthening European cooperation which can make us, together, the force in the service of peace, freedom and reconciliation that the world will be in ever more desperate need of.

They lie in safeguarding the ideas of the open society, open economies and the open world against those forces that want to turn back the clock.

Labels: Eastern Europe, Europe, Geopolitics, Northern Europe, Sweden

At Rivoluzione Italiana, commenter Hermit has been opening up new lines of inquiry in the Litvinenko poisoning mystery. His English-language post, reproduced on December 28 by Senator Guzzanti, reveals some new and disturbing details that have emerged from an interview with Litvinenko published on the Novosti Ukraina website in Russian some time ago. While it is true that Litvinenko said many things of dubious credibility, if he was in this instance telling the truth, this is a significant finding, and one wonders if the investigators of Scotland Yard are aware of it.

In the same blog, Hermit has drawn attention to the striking differences that characterize the approach of much of the German and Austrian press and media to the Litivinenko affair, when compared with the approach taken by their counterparts in other European countries.

Referring to enrix’s list of insults against M[ario]S[caramella], I would like to draw your attention to a strange campaign of hatred in some “very respected” German and Austrian newspapers

Der Spiegel (Hamburg, Germany)

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,456900,00.html

dated December 28 by Andreas Block

Schaumschläger im Schattenreich“millantatore di credito”,
SchwindlerHochstaplerzwielichtiger Akteur mit zweifelhafter KarriereSein Onkel
ist der Postfaschist Antonio Rastrellisogenannte
Mitrokhin-KommissionOppositions-Jäger mit Regierungsauftrag
____________________________

Die Presse

http://www.diepresse.com/Artikel.aspx?channel=p&ressort=a&id=608193 (Vienna,
Austria)

dated December 29, by PAUL KREINER in RomeBetrüger in Haft

Tagesspiegelhttp://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/archiv/30.12.2006/2993868.asp(Berlin,
Germany)

The same story from the same person in Rome but this time under
title

(30.12.2006)

Agent oder Hochstapler?
___________________________

As compared with rather balanced articles about MS in British, US,
French and Spanish press, the approach of some German media is extraordinary and
really strange.

What did Mr Gordievsky say about the KGB buying newspapers?

Hermit

The eighth issue of Chechenskoye Obshchestvo Segodnya (Chechen Society Today) is currently available for download (pdf, Russian) at the Prague Watchdog website.

Among other things, the current issue of the magazine contains an interesting interview with Czech journalist Petra Prohazkova, who has covered both the Chechen conflict and the war in Afghanistan. She compares the two experiences from a journalist’s point of view, stating that while from a personal standpoint she really prefers Russians to Americans, she admits that she would much rather cover bombing operations run by American forces: the bombing of Tora Bora was carried out with such precision that “the journalists stood calmly, smoking, adjusting their cameras, while the American planes that were bombing the nearby Taliban hillside flew overhead.” The Russian bombing of the Chechen capital Grozny was, by contrast, a thoroughly life-threatening episode for all who tried to witness and record it.

Ms. Prohazkova dispels the myth about the presence of Chechen fighters in Afghanistan. Although under the Taliban regime the Chechen government did have official representation in the country, and Yandarbiyev and Khattab visited it for a while, she says that now the Chechens “really aren’t here. One man once tried very hard to convince me that he’d killed a Chechen, a fearsome cutthroat. Then they showed me his diary, and we discovered that he was an Uzbek. It was just that for them, anyone who came from the post-Soviet space was a Chechen.”

Labels: Afghanistan, Central Asia, Chechnya, North Caucasus, Russia

Via Prague Watchdog [my tr.]

Borderland in Chechen mountains can only be reached with FSB’s permission

By Ruslan Isayev

CHECHNYA, December 29 - From now on it will only be possible to visit Chechen mountain villages located along the border with Georgia with special passes issued by the Federal Security Service (FSB). This was announced at a press conference given on December 27 by Andrei Sergeyev, director of the FSB border guard service for the Chechen Republic.

According to Sergeyev, the passes will be issued swiftly and on an individual basis. But violators of the new regime, which came into force at the beginning of December, can expect administrative punishment, and this may include expulsion from the zone.

After obtaining permission, any citizen will be able to stay in the border zone for six months. The residents of the villages concerned will only be able to remain in the zone on presentation of a passport that includes a local residence permit.

The border zone is considered to be the strip of land up to 5 kilometres wide which passes along the Chechen section of the Russia-Georgia state boundary. The section is more than 80 kilometres long.

Translated by David McDuff.

Labels: nuclear weapons, terrorism, United Kingdom

The Litvinenko poisoning affair continues to have special resonances in Italian politics. From Rivoluzione Italiana (the blog of Paolo Guzzanti) [my tr.]:

(ANSA) - ROME, Dec. 27 - “As we all know, making hypotheses about Professor Prodi’s past brings bad luck: Trofimov was killed, so was Litvinenko, and Scaramella is in jail while more crazy fabrications against me are being unfolded by the newspaper [La Repubblica] that is piloting the whole infamous framework being used to target not Scaramella, but the results of the bicameral parliamentary commission of inquiry on the Mitrokhin dossier and the Italian secret service.”

These are the words of former president of the parliamentary commission of inquiry on the Mitrokhin affair, Paolo Guzzanti, who says that “Andrea Papini is altering the truth of the facts when he asserts that I used information coming from Mario Scaramella in the election campaign, something he claims to document by citing my declaration of March 5 this year.”

“That day, in fact," - Guzzanti emphasizes - “I cited not Scaramella (whose documents originating with Litvinenko I classified as “unverifiable” by the commission because of the fact that the source of the news had been murdered) but another public and official document concerning an act of the European Parliament, namely the intervention of the British MEP Gerald Batten of April 3 2006 which asked the European Parliament to open an inquiry on the former President of the Commission Romano Prodi and his relations with the USSR. Batten said he had listened to ‘one of my constituents, Alexander Litvinenko’, who had provided ‘the same information he had already given’ to Scaramella, and which I had kept confidential. Batten’s intervention made public what I had kept secret on my own initiative, but which from April 3 onwards was not secret any more, as it concerned an act of Parliament which can also be found on the Internet.”

“In his intervention of April 3,” Guzzanti continues, “Gerald Batten said that the Russian exile who was subsequently assassinated with Polonium-210 told him: General Anatoly Trofimov, deputy head of the FSB (Russian intelligence agency) advised me not to settle in Italy, as there are many agents of the KGB among the politicians, and Romano Prodi ‘is our man there’.

“As we all know, making hypotheses about Professor Prodi’s past brings bad luck: Trofimov was killed, so was Litvinenko, and Scaramella is in jail while more crazy fabrications against me are being unfolded by the newspaper that is piloting the whole infamous framework being used to target not Scaramella, but the results of the bicameral parliamentary commission of inquiry on the Mitrokhin dossier and the Italian secret service.”

Labels: Eastern Europe, Europe, FSB, Human Rights, Italy, Litvinenko, Russia, Southern Europe

The blog of Italian senator Paolo Guzzanti continues to ruminate on the background to the Litvinenko poisoning affair. In recent weeks the blog has been transforming itself into a fully-fledged discussion forum, with a large amount of space devoted to a standoff between posters of left-wing and right-wing sympathies, moderated with admirable tolerance and fair-mindedness by the senator himself.

In the most recent post - and accompanying comments - the blog considers the strange circumstance that Mario Scaramella, who met with Litvinenko at a London sushi bar shortly before the onset of his fatal illness, has now been arrested in Italy on a charge of slandering an obscure Ukrainian intelligence agent.

AIA has published a lengthy study of the life and career of Boris Berezovsky which characterizes him as Putin’s main rival. Among other things, the article, which is presented in a somewhat difficult-to-read translation from Russian, cites certain claims about Mr Berezovsky’s links to Western intelligence - claims that some may want to consider further.

In Commentary magazine, Leon Aron asks the question.

The ideology behind the Putin restoration rests in the first place on a distinct interpretation of recent Russian history. When Putin came into office, the fall of the Soviet Union and the reforms of the late 1980’s and 90’s were generally accepted as the consequences of a free, if imperfectly implemented, choice of the Russian people. Today, that crucial decade-and-a-half is seen in a very different light. Many key policies from that time are now viewed as shameful mistakes, deeply harmful to the country’s interests and committed by leaders who were at best naïve and weak, at worst venal and perfidious—if not, in fact, participants in a vast plot perpetrated by outsiders intent on weakening the Soviet (and then Russian) state. As Putin himself famously declared, the collapse of the Soviet Union was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”

Key postulates of Russian national political culture—so magnificently and, many of us thought, permanently banished by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin—have now returned in force. It is once again respectable to say that the glory of Russia is the state, that what is good for the state is necessarily good for the country, and that the strengthening of the state is society’s primary objective. Hence, the state functionary (naturally conceived as a model of enlightenment, probity, and public spirit) is today considered a far more effective agent of progress than a free press (so sensationalist and profit-seeking), the voter (so uneducated and fickle), the judge (a bribe-taker), or, heaven forbid, the private entrepreneur.

(via CH)

Labels: Human Rights, Putin, Russia

There will be a short break in posting over the Christmas holiday.

Season's greetings!

In EJ, Marina Litvinovich, editor-in-chief of the Truth of Beslan website, protests about the lies and distortions in the official Russian report on the Beslan tragedy [my tr.]:

For a start, it’s important to make it clear that no report has been published, although the commission promised to do this. All that has happened is that the commission’s head, Alexander Torshin, read out this report - so far there is no printed text anywhere.

No one was invited to hear the presentation of the report - not journalists, nor victims, nor hostages nor relatives - no one. Everything is being done in a hurry and in secret. On the eve of the holidays, on Friday, so that no one would even notice what was taking place. Moreover, after the report the Federation Council has already voted to close the activity of the Commission of Inquiry into the terror act in Beslan. In other words, as far as the Federation Council is concerned, the matter is now closed.

Now the State Duma is to have its say. But the text of the report was presented in the lower chamber of parliament only yesterday evening, and the Duma Council has not yet had time to study it. But at today’s session already they are already trying to raise a motion for the closing of the commission’s activity. Meanwhile, not a single deputy has actually seen the text. Thus, they propose to vote blindly.

Let us move on to the text itself. The report is very similar to the one that was published in August - in fact, the commission has not worked since then. The commission did not meet in September, or October, or November, or December. And it’s totally unclear what the new report is based on, because no work has actually been done, there have been no expert assessments, no new evidence has been examined.

Moreover, Torshin’s report is based on the same assessment of the actions of operational staff which was removed from the judicial process six weeks ago. An assessment, in other words, that has been acknowledged to be illegal and invalid. As for the report’s principal conclusion - that the first shots were the result of the actions of the guerrillas - this conclusion has not been confirmed in any way. By no mathematical calculations or technical analyses - it is all empty words. Thus, Torshin asserts that the federal forces did not fire flamethrowers at the school in which the hostages were held. Yet one has only to enumerate the people who were killed or injured as they stood in the windows - from this it follows naturally that the shooting came from the street. There is much evidence to support the contention that there was also firing from tanks.

Another of the report’s conclusions is that 32 people took part in the school seizure, of whom 31 were killed and one has been sentenced in court. This is simply ridiculous. Even the Prosecutor’s office has already admitted under pressure from us that there may have been more of them. It’s a mystery why this figure has not changed in Torshin’s reports since 2004 - there is a mass of evidence which refutes it.

All this is being done for one purpose alone - to close the question of Beslan. And to bring an end, as the government representatives say, to “the speculations and insinuations” on this subject. But I think, these efforts are in vain - those who suffered will not give up. Whatever the lies that Torshin gives them, they lost their children and they will go to the end.

What is more, the investigation continues: expert analyses are being made, there are studies, examinations of witnesses. It’s only for Torshin that the question is closed - he is the only one for whom it’s all clear. He has cleared it all up and decided not to do any more work, taking into account the fact that in any case he has actually done no work for the past six months.

Labels: Beslan, Chechnya, Human Rights, Marina Litvinovich, North Caucasus, Russia

Labels: Human Rights, Khodorkovsky, Russia

From TimesOnline:

Russia demonstrated its renewed influence over Ukraine yesterday during the first visit by President Putin since the Orange Revolution swept pro-Western reformers to power.

Mr Putin met President Yushchenko in Kiev in what both leaders described as an effort to mend relations after the revolution and the “gas war” in January that cut off supplies to Ukraine.

Mr Putin told reporters: “We had a very constructive, good, friendly dialogue. Everything was very pragmatic and businesslike.”

Estonica is a web encyclopedia about Estonia, in English and Estonian. It has entries on the history, culture, nature, economy and society of Estonia, and much more besides. It’s a constantly growing project, and promises to become a central information resource on the country and its people. There are maps, photographs and illustrations, and it’s also possible to comment and leave feedback.

The essays on Estonian music are particularly noteworthy, giving a background not only to the latest avant-garde and pop expressions, but also to the more traditional symphonic, choral and chamber music that still continues to emerge from this intensely European nation, not least from the country’s Russian-speaking community, with its Narva Symphony Orchestra and Russian Philharmonic Society.

Indeed, the survey of Russian culture in Estonia makes fascinating reading. The encyclopedia notes that

On 14 March 2002 the Cultural Endowment of Estonia issued for the first time a literature award to an author writing in Russian. The first award winner was Larissa Vaneyeva (1955). Various other Russian writers live or work in Estonia, e.g. prose writer Mikhail Veller (1948), an Estonian citizen who lives in St Petersburg, Tallinn and Israel and whose works appear in Russia in hundreds of thousands of copies; Yelena Skulskaya (1950), poet and prosaist whose poems have been considerably influenced by the Estonian poetry of the 1960s; Svetlan Semenenko (1939) poet and an eminent translator of Estonian literature; and some others.

The output of Russian writers is mainly published in three literary and cultural magazines: ‘Vyshgorod’ (Toompea Hill), ‘Raduga’ (Rainbow) and ‘Tallinn’, although they contain a fair number of translations from Estonian authors as well. Quite a few books by both Russian and Estonian authors have recently been published in the Russian language, with the most active period falling in the early 1990s. Today, a few publishing houses specialising in Russian literature have remained: ‘Antek’, ‘Avenarius’, ‘Ingri’, ‘KPD’. Besides fiction, they also issue, to a lesser extent, scientific and popular scientific books by Russian authors.

Labels: Baltics, Culture, Estonia, Europe, Literature, Music

Far from trying to conceal the growing power of Russia’s secret police, President Putin is apparently doing everything he can to advertise it, TimesOnline reports, in a description of Chekist Day:

Mr Putin, a former KGB spy, heaped praise on the secret services as state television broadcast pictures of champagne flowing and an orchestra playing classical music in a hall packed with spy chiefs and politicians.

The event on Wednesday evening marked the annual Security Service Workers’ Day, better known as Chekist Day. The Cheka, forerunner of the KGB, was founded on December 20, 1917, by Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the feared secret police. "There are many glorious pages, bright examples of true heroism and courage in
the history of national state security organisations,” Mr Putin told the gathering.

He reserved his “very warmest words of gratitude” for KGB veterans whose efforts, he said, had laid the foundations for Russia’s modern secret services. "This profession employs those who love our Motherland and who are selflessly devoted to their people. And it is not simply qualifications but also a high degree of civic consciousness and courage that act as guidelines for important and professional activities in this field,” Mr Putin said.

Germany is to "toughen" a plan on European policy towards Russia that has been drafted by the SPD-controlled Foreign Ministry, the IHT reports (see also RFE/RL). The plan was to have been an important part of Germany's forthcoming EU Presidency and chairmanship of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialized countries, which begin on January 1, and it will still go ahead, but with major modifications, to

reflect the erosion of human rights, the murder of a prominent journalist and the use of energy as a political weapon under President Vladimir Putin, senior government officials said Wednesday... under pressure from Chancellor Angela Merkel and senior members of the Christian Democratic Union and Christian Social Union, which are part of her governing coalition, the Foreign Ministry is preparing to include references to human rights and the rule of law. The two issues have caused increasing unease in the West. Both were absent from the Foreign Ministry's original paper.

Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who arrived in Moscow on Wednesday for two days of talks that will include a meeting with Putin on Thursday, was asked by the chancellery to raise human rights issues, including the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who was shot outside her Moscow apartment in October.

"The Foreign Ministry knows exactly what our views are about its paper on Russia," said Ruprecht Polenz, a Christian Democrat who is the chairman of the foreign affairs committee of the Bundestag. "As we prepare to take over the EU presidency, it is absolutely necessary that we make clear to Putin what we think about his policy toward human rights and the rule of law."

Putin promised an investigation into the killing when he met Merkel in Dresden shortly after the shooting, but German officials said they had heard nothing since.

This blog has now made the switch from Old Blogger to New Blogger. I'd postponed taking this step, but then saw a couple of days ago that the new version of the Blogger software is finally out of beta. Everything seems to work more or less as before, though there are a few more bells and whistles, and posting is definitely faster.

In the comments, Jeremy Putley has contributed a note on the Zakayev/Berezovsky "extradition" case:

Yuri Chaika's posturing is in anticipation of an impending announcement by HM government concerning the murder of a British citizen on British soil, with disclosures that will include a statement confirming that the murder was executed by Russian agents acting on the instructions of a highly-placed Kremlin official. Measures to be announced will include a large number of personnel at the Russian embassy being expelled from the country, and severe impairment of international relations until Putin goes.

Chaika's "extradition" efforts are therefore anticipatory posturing and disinformation, essentially the type of hypocrisy we saw in the bad old cold war days. Chaika is well aware that his extradition case is bound to fail, the more so because it is well known in the West that the Russian judicial system is as corrupt as the Russian "security" services. No court will ever extradite suspects to Russia's travesty of a system of justice.

Mayor of London

news release
Office hours: 020 7983 4070
Out of hours and weekends: 020 7983 4000
www.london.gov.uk

GLA/2006/677

Wednesday 20 December 2006 FORWARD PLANNING - LIVE EVENTS

Plans announced for third Russian New Year celebrations in Trafalgar Square



Event Russian Winter Festival
Venue Trafalgar Square, London WC2
Date Saturday 13 January 2007
Time 11am-6:30pm
Entry FREE
Information 020 7983 4100; www.eventica.co.uk/events/rwf/2007 / www.london.gov,uk

The third Russian Winter Festival, organised by Eventica with the support of the Russian Economic Forum and the Mayor of London, will take place on Saturday 13 January 2007, the eve of the Russian ‘Old New Year’, which was originally celebrated before 1917.

The free event is open to all and will feature an eclectic mix of live performance, music and other attractions aimed at people of all ages.

Live performances will include young Russian Londoners performing classical Russian folk dance and songs, as well as professional musical ensembles. Music will range from the traditional – including balalaikas and accordions and dance moves such as the Cossack kazachok – to contemporary popular music from Russia itself.

There will be Russian crafts and other products available from specially constructed Russian kiosks, Russian children’s games and puppet performances, and traditional Russian food.

Further details about performers will be released in due course.

More information about the Russian Winter Festival is available by calling Lieran Stubbings at Eventica on 020 7183 2560, or Ben McKnight in the Mayor’s press office on 020 7983 4071.

Notes to editors

1. The Russian Winter Festival will take place in Trafalgar Square on Saturday 13 January 2007. It is being organised by the Russian Economic Forum, with the support of the Mayor of London. For more information: www.eventica.co.uk/events/rwf/2007. Or call the Greater London Authority on 020 7983 4100, or Lieran Stubbings at the Russian Economic Forum on 020 7183 2560.

2. The event celebrates the Russian Old New Year, which falls in mid-January and is based on the Julian calendar, which was in use before 1917.

3. Eventica, which organises annual business, social and investment events, (its flagship event being the Russian Economic Forum which is held in London in April), is hosting its annual ‘Old New Year’ gala dinner at the Guildhall on Friday 12 January, as a curtain raiser to the Russian Winter Festival. Further information on attending and sponsoring the event can be obtained by telephone 020 7183 2560, or by emailing Elena at em@eventica.co.uk

4. Proceeds raised during the Gala Dinner will support the construction fund for the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of the Adoration of the Virgin Mary in Chiswick, London.

5. The Russian Winter Festival seeks to innovate and add to its themes each year. Sporting elements have always proven popular and the Russian Winter Festival 2007 will seek to integrate sport with culture by profiling winter sports. Famous sporting personalities will appear at the event at strategic points throughout the whole day, information will be available on Sochi – Russia’s Candidate City for the Winter Olympics 2014 and competitions will be held with the best on simulated winter sports games!

MEDIA ENQUIRIES: Press information is available from Ben McKnight on 020 7983 4071 (number not for publication) or Lieran Stubbings on 020 7183 2560

GENERAL PUBLIC/NON-MEDIA ENQUIRIES: Call the Public Liaison Unit at the Greater London Authority on 020 7983 4100

DUTY PRESS OFFICER: For out-of-hours media enquiries, please call 020 7983 4000



————————————————
Benjamin McKnight
Chief Communications Officer

Mayor’s Press Office
Greater London Authority
City Hall
The Queen’s Walk
London SE1 2AA

t: 020 7983 4071
m: 07881 501 920

www.london.gov.uk





GREATERLONDONAUTHORITY

The Russian authorities have not yet given up their long-held aim of extraditing Akhmed Zakayev and Boris Berezovsky from Britain. The Litvinenko case appears to be the latest instrument being used by Moscow in this strategy. A report in Gazeta notes that

The Public Prosecutor’s Office will again attempt to attain the extradition of Zakayev to his native land. Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika recently directly stated such intentions. Especially as now the Russian investigators, after the visit to Moscow of the detectives of Scotland Yard (yesterday the completion of their work was announced), have a real possibility to meet personally with Zakayev His questioning will take place within the framework of the case concerning Litvinenko’s poisoning with polonium-210 (The Prosecutor’s Office is conducting its own investigation), but it is unlikely that the only subject of discussion will be the death of the former FSB official, with whom Zakayev was friendly.

Update: Akhmed Zakayev has responded to the Russian threats:

He said the Kremlin was trying to scare him into silence after he blamed it for the murders of campaigning journalist Anna Politkovskaya and Litvinenko, a former security agent who was Zakayev’s friend and neighbour in London.
—————–
“You can liquidate a person or you can frighten him. Either way, if he shuts up, you’ve reached your goal. Of course they want the same thing from me,” Zakayev told Reuters.

Labels: Europe, Human Rights, Russia, UK

The following is my own translation of Oleg Gordievsky’s interview for Radio Liberty’s Russian Service (December 18, 2006):

How would you assess the collaboration of the Russian authorities with Scotland Yard in the Litvinenko case, on the whole?

A pure disaster, and the British detectives knew what they were in for when they went. They had to, so to speak, ‘give evidence’ of their respect, they were to come and take a look, and just enter it into the record, because neither Kovtun nor Lugovoy… no one was presented to them in the proper way. The British detectives sat there, they realized this was purely a pathetic show the Russians were putting on. The British are not fools, they knew that the Russians have never collaborated honestly with the British in juridical questions.

Then why, in your view, don’t the British officials voice criticism to Moscow?

Because they are gathering information, information of enormous import, which will lead to an immense explosion of indignation throughout the entire world. It’s all being got together, everything is known. I knew who the killer was on the fourth day. They all know, but they’re doing it all step by step, in the correct way, it must be done according to procedure, according to official record… As I sit here now I’m also writing a statement, by the way, two detectives are sitting here with me. And they will publish it some time next year.

You said that you know who killed Litvinenko. Won’t you share your knowledge with Radio Liberty?

I can only give you a hint. It was a person whom Lugovoy and company… who joined them for 10 minutes. They said: “Hey Volodya. Volodya, here’s Sasha. Sasha, don’t you know Volodya? He also works in a kind of business that might be able to organize some work for you. Sit down.” He sat down. “Well, maybe just a cup of tea.” “All right, I’ll get it for you.” He went, brought the cup of tea and put it in front of him. And that was it – that was the end of Sasha. There’s this person, and where is he… The KGB group, which notified neither Lugovoy nor the other agents who were taking part, was a big one. They rehearsed, they had two rehearsals. They rehearsed in Moscow. Then they rehearsed in London. Then they had another rehearsal in the morning. It was all carefully arranged, as in the Bolshoi Theatre. But they didn’t know that this was a substance that kills people, and even this main killer, even he didn’t know what kind of a substance it was, what power it had.

The Times newspaper writes that the dose of polonium-210 with which Litvinenko was poisoned was 10 times greater than the lethal dose and that its cost was more than 10 million dollars. How could it be that they had so many rehearsals and yet they didn’t know what they were doing?

The people who were rehearsing, they didn’t know, they weren’t told, they weren’t supposed to know, only the bosses knew. But they rehearsed, they rehearsed, and on one occasion they even dropped the container. It was the British who discovered that, for the British equipment has proved to be the best in the world. This polonium, this pill that was made, it didn’t cost 10 million, someone has exaggerated there.

But doesn’t this super-dose prove that the whole thing was not done in a very professional way? May it not be used as an argument to support what many are now saying, that the Russian special services are not behind this?

You say: it’s not the Russian special services. But who does stand behind it, in that case? The Americans, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis, the Israelis, all of whom have the bomb? Well, who can stand behind them? Polonium-210 is available only in Russia and the United States. Both the Americans and the British know the power station at which polonium is produced and in what quantity, how it’s packed, and in what type of container, they know its weight, they know everything about it. And all that questioning they did in Moscow was just pure comedy, their aim was simply to be able to say we’ve done what we were supposed to do.

What, in your view, is the role of Lugovoy, Kovtun and Sokolenko in the Litvinenko case?

Calculations of this kind, which are still premature, lead one to the thought that they are not the killers because they were just the killer’s assistants. The killer was this man who arrived from the side. While the other two sat, distracting his attention.

Why, in your view, was polonium-210, a substance that leaves so many traces, chosen for the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko?

They want to demonstrate something new. They developed this. Did you know that polonium-210 leaves traces? I didn’t. And no one did. This was the main failure of this operation. Everything else was done correctly, everything was calculated, and so on. But what they didn’t know was that this equipment, this technology exists in the West – they didn’t know that, and that was where they miscalculated.

AIA has the digest of an RFE/RL Russian Service interview with Oleg Gordievsky on the Litvinenko case. Excerpt:

Gordievsky claimed he knew who was the murderer on the fourth day after it happened. He said that British experts also knew it, “but they have been doing everything step by step, as it is correctly and it is necessary in this case according to procedure”. “Some time next year will publish the results”, said Gordievsky. Asked to name the murderer, the ex-spy said he could make a hint only. “It was the person, who joined Lugovoy and the company for ten minutes”. According to Gordievsky, they [Lugovoy and the company] introduced him to Litvinenko as Volodya and told that “he also works in such business that could provide [you] some work”. Gordievsky said the man went away for a while and brought a cup of tea, and “so the end of Sasha had come”. The ex-spy said the participants [of the murder] was a large group and they had rehearsed [their action] several times, in Moscow and then in London. However “they did not know what force this material possessed, even the main murderer did not know, only the bosses did know”.

An investigative article in Novaya gazeta dissects the official Russian version of the Litvinenko poisoning case, and reminds readers that

Until November 1 Litvinenko had left no traces of radiation anywhere.

Kovtun began to leave traces of polonium in Hamburg on October 28.

Before his meeting with Litvinenko, Lugovoy stayed in room 441 of the Millennium Hotel, where very strong traces - the initial traces - of polonium-210 were found.

The radiation “tail” followed Alexander Litvinenko only after his meeting with Kovtun and Lugovoy in the bar of the Millennium Hotel. And it was there that a cup which had been strongly contaminated with polonium was found.

This photograph (kommersant.ru) was taken during the “March of Dissenters” (Marsh nesoglasnykh) which took place in Moscow on Saturday, involving the participation of about 3,000 demonstrators from various factions and groupings. It shows Mikhail Kasyanov, Eduard Limonov and Garry Kasparov marching very close together - causing some observers to wonder: is Limonov changing his views, and is the National Bolshevik Party which he leads a different party now? Or is something else happening here?

(via M.L.)

RFE/RL has an interesting feature about how the CIA may have performed the inestimable service of arranging in 1958 for the first Russian-language publication of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago. In the same year, Albert Camus had nominated Pasternak for the Nobel Prize, but the award could not be made unless the novel had been published in the original language - no Soviet publisher would do this, and the risks for the author of having the book published in a Western country were great.

According to RFE/RL’s Ivan Tolstoi, it was the CIA which ultimately managed to get the book put out in the West - and this may not only have secured the Nobel Prize for the poet and author, but also saved his life:

“Thanks to the fact that Pasternak won the Nobel Prize, Pasternak wasn’t arrested,” says Tolstoi. “This deed by the CIA served to ennoble and save Pasternak. The actions of American intelligence saved a great Russian poet.”

But, in a December 14 presentation in Moscow, Tolstoi said “Pasternak had absolutely nothing to do with” the operation. “The American intelligence community did and financed everything itself, in order that a famous novel from an ingenious writer and poet might receive recognition.”

Pasternak was forced to decline the award under pressure from Soviet authorities. But when he died two years later, in 1960, it was in his home in Peredelkino — not in prison or exile abroad. It was a better fate than those of many Russian writers of the time.

Tolstoi said America’s use of culture as a weapon in its ideological battle with the Soviet Union typifies what he calls “the drama of the Cold War.”

“American intelligence, American policy, in this story, battled Kremlin ideology and communism not with poison, or kidnappings, or some other unseemly actions, but with the help of Russian culture,” Tolstoi said. “They used Russian culture to fight against the Soviet state.”

(via M.L.)

The presidents of Estonia and Ukraine have issued a joint declaration, committing their countries to a programme of bilateral cooperation. In particular, the declaration notes:

8. Presence of national minorities – Estonian national minority in Ukraine and Ukrainian national minority in Estonia, assurance of their rights, satisfaction of language, cultural, educational, informational and other needs have positive impact on bilateral relationship of two countries;

9. Improving conditions for mutual trade and investment is a common goal, especially bearing in mind the growing interest of European investors in Ukraine’s markets;

10. Secure energy supplies and transparency in the energy sector, as well as joint participation in energy projects, are gaining importance in Estonian-Ukrainian cooperation, and need to be expanded further on the basis of the principles of the European Energy Charter;

11. Both countries wish to cooperate in the development of the transport corridor between the regions of the Black and Baltic Seas, and the increasing of the range of container transport in the Caucasian-Caspian and Scandinavian directions;

12. Estonia and Ukraine note the importance of adhering to international law, principles of sovereignty, territorial integrity and good neighborly relations in the settlement of so-called “frozen” conflicts in Europe, including Transnistria and conflicts in the Southern Caucasus, as well as disputes between states. Solving these conflicts, as soon as possible, in a peaceful way, and according to the aforementioned principles, is of immense importance to regional security and stability, as well as to the development of the states concerned;

(hat tip: Leopoldo)

In August, Amnesty International showed that it had lost its way in the modern world when it took the sorry step of trying to accuse Israel of war crimes in Lebanon. Now the organization is again reinforcing the impression that it has lost the moral focus which once inspired it, by issuing a report on Estonia which - almost incredibly - charges that country with “human rights abuses” allegedly committed against its Russian-speaking residents.

As Edward Lucas points out on his blog and in The Economist,

The report is puzzling for several reasons. It is a bad piece of work, ahistorical and unbalanced. It echoes Kremlin propaganda in a way that Estonians find sinister and offensive. But most puzzling of all, it is a bizarre use of Amnesty’s limited resources. Just a short drive from Estonia, in Belarus and in Russia, there are real human rights abuses, including two classic Amnesty themes: misuse of psychiatry against dissidents, and multiple prisoners of conscience. Yet the coverage of these issues on the Amnesty website is feeble, dated, or non-existent.

Amnesty seems to have become just another left-wing pressure group, banging on about globalisation, the arms trade, Israel and domestic violence. Regardless of the merits of their views—which look pretty stale and predictable—it seems odd to move to what is already a crowded corner of the political spectrum. To save Jüri Kukk and other inmates of the gulag, people of all political views and none joined Amnesty’s campaigns. That wouldn’t happen now.

RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Tatar-Bashkir, and Ukrainian services have all contributed to a report on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonid Brezhnev. Excerpt:

Golzada Rzayeva is a 58-year-old living in Chally in the republic of Tatarstan. Also known as Naberezhnyye Chelny, the city between 1982 and 1988 enjoyed a brief period under a third name — Brezhnev.

Rzayeva, the longtime head of the local cultural center, says she has good memories of the Brezhnev era.

“This was a very good, youthful time, we lived with youthful enthusiasm, without problems. There was just one problem at that time: finding nice clothes,” Rzayeva said.

Vyacheslav Komarov, a 69-year-old pensioner, is similarly enthusiastic. Komarov lives in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine’s third-largest city and a key industrial center in the Soviet Union that is also a short distance from Brezhnev’s birthplace of Dneprodzherzhinsk.

Under Brezhnev’s rule, Komarov worked at a restricted weapons facility. But even such a serious occupation, he says, did not prevent employees from taking time to enjoy themselves at work.

“Under Brezhnev, feasts and parties were permitted. On any holiday, even on Paris Commune day, we got together, set the table, and had a nice party at work. We were always having some kind of celebration,” Komarov said.

Russia’s ORT television station is marking the 100th anniversary of Brezhnev’s birth by broadcasting a film depicting the Soviet leader as a kindly soul who loved his wife, fought for the common man, and was ultimately duped by sinister associates like former KGB head Yury Andropov.

And there are the jokes:

“After a speech Brezhnev shouts at his speech writer: ‘I ordered you to write a 15-minute speech, but it took me a whole hour to read!’ ‘Sorry, Leonid Ilyich,’ he answered, ‘there were four copies, and you read them all.’

Sobesednik has published an interview with Alla Dudayeva, Dzhokhar Dudayev’s widow. Chechnya Weekly has a resume of some of the highlights:

ALLA DUDAEVA DESCRIBES BEING INTERROGATED BY LITVINENKO

Alla Dudaeva, widow of the Chechen leader Djokhar Dudaev, gave an extensive interview to Sobesednik that was published on December 11, the twelfth anniversary of the start of the first Chechen war. Dudaeva, who is now living with her son in Lithuania, told the Russian weekly that after the death of her husband, who was killed in a Russian air strike in April 1996, she was interrogated by Aleksandr Litvinenko, the dissident Federal Security Service (FSB) officer recently murdered with Polonium-210 in London. “Djokhar had just been killed, and we were preparing to fly with the whole family to Turkey, but we were arrested in Nalchik [the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria],” Dudaeva recalled. “I was interrogated by a specially dispatched young officer, who introduced himself as `Colonel Aleksandr Volkov.’ He joked that it was not an accidental last name…After some time, I saw him on television next to [tycoon Boris] Berezovsky and found out his real last name – Litvinenko.” According to Dudaeva, during the interrogation, Litvinenko wanted to find out “the truth” about her husband’s death. “The special services were worried that he might have survived and escaped abroad,” she told Sobesednik.

In the Sobesednik interview, Dudaeva gave her version of how her husband was tracked down and killed. “Djokhar received his satellite telephone as a present from [then] Turkish Prime Minister [Negemuddeen] Arbakan,” she said. “As the phone was being assembled in Turkey, Turkish leftists with connections to the Russian special services, through a spy, placed a special microchip in it [the satellite phone]…A Turkish Internet newspaper wrote about this in 2001. In addition, a system of round-the-clock surveillance of Djokhar Dudaev’s telephone was set up in the Signet Super Computer Center located in the state of Maryland in the United States [an apparent reference to a putative NSA facility]. The U.S. National Security Agency transmitted information about the location and telephone conversations of Djokhar Dudaev to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on a daily basis. Turkey received that dossier. And leftist Turkish military officers handed the dossier over to the Russian FSB. Djokhar knew that a hunt for him had begun. When the [satellite phone’s] connection would be broken after a minute, he would joke: `So, they’ve already figured it out?’ But, all the same, he was sure his telephone wouldn’t be located.”

Dudaeva said that “Chechen oil” is the reason why the Chechen conflict continues. “As soon as the former Kremlin protégé Akhmat Kadyrov tried to take control of it [Chechen oil] and announced this publicly, he was blown up there and then,” she told Sobesednik. (The elder Kadyrov was killed in a bomb explosion in Grozny in May 2004). “And he was most likely killed by those whose `property’ he was encroaching on. The uncontrolled extraction of oil is possible only when a war is going on. Therefore, as soon as someone begins to demand peace talks, he is immediately killed. Those who are stealing oil are also sharing it with their associates at the top.”

A thoroughly perceptive and thought-provoking point that’s made in the Economist’s latest diagnosis of just what is wrong with Russia. The article sees

the problem at the bottom of Russia’s increasingly bitter ties with the West: the Russians’ deep conviction that the rest of the world works as Russia does, and that all politics and diplomacy are as cynical and self-interested as Russia’s own.

The row over Mr Berezovsky is another example of this way of thinking. Some Russians simply refuse to believe that in Britain extradition cases are decided by the courts, rather than by the government. Likewise, some in the Kremlin were angry that Litvinenko’s deathbed accusations managed to penetrate his police guard to be broadcast: they apparently assumed that protection meant arrest.

Via Stratfor.com

The Iranian Position

By Reva Bhalla

The Iraq Study Group (ISG) has issued its long-awaited — and by now, much-criticized — report to the White House, and has met with a lukewarm reception. President George W. Bush is now seeking input from a cadre of other agencies and officials as he attempts to formulate a new Iraq strategy, which will be announced in January 2007. Presumably, the perspectives and ideas being gathered from the Pentagon, the State Department and others will be placed alongside the ISG’s 79 recommendations, which did more to address the United States’ diplomatic challenges in the Middle East than to articulate a rational course of action for the U.S. military.

One of the most significant recommendations put forth by the ISG was one to which the Bush administration — on the surface, at least — appears to be strongly opposed: Engage Iran directly in negotiations. This should hardly come as a surprise to anyone. Even if Iran’s importance to any strategic equation involving Iraq had not been apparent since the very beginning of the “postwar” period or before, due to geopolitical factors and Iranian actions, there certainly were enough leaks as to what the Baker-Hamilton panel was going to say to prepare the American public for a move in this direction. And of course, the administration itself long had engaged in back channel dealings with Iran designed to shape the future of Iraq — at least, until a political deal fell apart at the crucial moment in early summer.

Politically speaking, it is obvious why the administration has balked at suggestions that the United States should openly extend the hand of diplomacy to Iran, which — chiefly through the mouthpiece of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — has said and done little to endear itself to the world, and much to spotlight the weakness of the U.S. position. Geopolitically speaking, it is equally obvious why the United States has no real choice in the matter. Washington’s best option is to combine diplomacy with a military strategy (which we have discussed elsewhere) that can open the door to a substantial drawdown. But engaging Iran on some level — however unpalatable it seems — is an unavoidable part of the equation.

It is useful, then, to consider the situation from Iran’s point of view. The straitjacket the United States now finds itself in was not created overnight, but through years of careful manipulation. The Islamic Republic now is drawing the world’s attention to its position of strength in the region, but there also are some internal issues that weigh on the minds of regime leaders and must be carefully managed if this strength is to be maintained.

The Iranian Strategy

Tehran has been maneuvering for years to secure certain interests in the region. First and foremost, of course, is the country’s own national security, for which the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Baghdad was a prerequisite. With the establishment of a friendly (or at least neutral), Shiite-controlled government in Baghdad, Iran would be able to both secure the primary goal of security and be well down the path toward a secondary and equally desirable goal: regional hegemony.

Therefore, an Iranian strategy began emerging almost from the moment the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad fell in April 2003. The strategy has revolved around shaping events in the region and, crucially, external perceptions of Iran and its leadership. The chief tactics employed have been manipulation of political events in Iraq, a vocal emphasis on Iran’s nuclear program, skillful use of politically incorrect (at times, seemingly maniacal) statements by Ahmadinejad, the activation of regional proxies and, above all, patience. Stratfor has explored many of these tactics in detail before, but we will recap them here briefly as the strategy, viewed in full, is quite something to behold.

Nuclear Weapons and Image Control

Let’s begin with the most potent part of the strategy (both politically and militarily): the nuclear program.

Iran clearly has used this as a bargaining chip in the back channel dealings over Iraq. Rather than pursuing a covert nuclear program — which has been the logical course if obtaining nuclear weapons were truly Iran’s primary goal in the beginning — the Iranians made a conscious decision to tout their nuclear advances publicly. Their political and energy partners in Moscow and Beijing routinely have played defense, ensuring that the nuclear issue languishes in the U.N. Security Council. And Tehran has made sure to crank up the rhetoric whenever political developments in Iraq take an unfavorable turn — while always staying clear of the red line (beyond which the United States or Israel could be expected to mount pre-emptive strikes). This tactic has helped shape perceptions of Iran as a force to be reckoned with, while keeping Washington and its allies off balance in negotiations over Iraq. And, significantly, nuclear weapons no longer appear to be a red herring tactic, but an end of themselves for Tehran.

Closely related to this has been the image campaign for Ahmadinejad, who has been carefully and purposely branded in the public mind as an utter lunatic. The nearly unknown, populist mayor from Tehran was captured in the public spotlight during Iran’s 2005 summer election season. Before the world could even begin to form an opinion of him, he began threatening to wipe Israel off the map, labeling the Holocaust an enormous lie and so forth. As North Korea’s experiments with the “crazy fearsome cripple gambit” have showed, an otherwise weak state — headed by a seemingly wild-eyed leader who just might be mad enough to launch some of the nukes that the state may or may not actually possess — can gain useful concessions, if not respect, from the rest of the world. And in Iran’s case, it certainly made Israel and the United States to think twice about whether to attempt any military adventures concerning the Islamic Republic.

Regional Proxies

Tehran has shown itself equally effective in its use of militant proxies in the region.

The financial, ideological, political and military support of Iran has helped Hezbollah build a strong following among the mostly poor Shiite population of southern Lebanon. Since Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, the Shiite militant group was left languishing — provoking the occasional border skirmish with Israel as a way of maintaining its credibility. But over the summer, while the world was focused on Iraq, Hezbollah roared back to life in a conflict that went well beyond a border skirmish.

There is reason to believe Iran had a hand in igniting that conflict. In early July, when long-range missiles began raining down on Haifa, sources within Hezbollah hinted to Stratfor that the launch had taken them by surprise — indicating something more than a routine kidnapping of Israeli soldiers that garnered unintended consequences. Hezbollah forces certainly took a beating during the 34-day conflict, but the important point is that the militant group successfully resisted the Israeli military.

This outcome has purchased long-term benefits for both Hezbollah and Iran. On the micro level, it has attracted new levels of support for Hezbollah and engendered a new sense of confidence within the movement — which is now moving to expand its political clout through massive street demonstrations in Beirut, designed to bring down the government controlled by its opponents. On the macro level, the outcome of the conflict left Israel in military and political paralysis — providing Iran with even more room to maneuver politically within the region.

In addition to Hezbollah, Iran has kept in close touch with its Shiite proxies in Bahrain and Kuwait — a quiet reminder to Sunni Arab states in the region that Tehran retains the means to destabilize their neighborhoods, as it did Israel’s, should circumstances compel it. Iran’s rising influence in the region has put the Arab regimes on a defensive footing, and some are now questioning the wisdom of strategies that rely on U.S. military strength to secure their interests. It is for this reason, then, that Saudi Arabia is now hinting it will step up support for Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council have announced plans to launch a joint nuclear program (ostensibly for civilian energy purposes). The Sunni states lack strong military capabilities of their own, but will shout as loudly as possible to make it clear to the United States that they will not sit idly by while Iran recasts the region’s balance of power in favor of the Shia.

Iraq: The Center of Gravity

All of these tactics, of course, hit around the periphery of what is really the first and most crucial issue: Iraq. It is there that Iran’s political manipulations, its use of proxies and its great patience — as the poor position of U.S. troops and of the U.S. president both grew increasingly evident — have come into play. And with its growing confidence in the region, Iran seemingly has become less inclined to settle for merely a friendly or neutral government in Baghdad. Instead, it wants control.

As expected, October turned out to be a particularly deadly month for U.S. forces in Iraq, with Iran helping to fuel attacks by its Shiite militant proxies. These Iranian-sponsored rebels are an assortment of militants, many of whom received training from Hezbollah cadres in Lebanon. Iran also has enlisted rogue elements from Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement to aid in this effort. The timing of the uptick in American casualties played into the U.S. political cycle — as the Iranians could have predicted — and contributed to the Republican upset in November’s U.S. congressional elections. At the same time, already loud demands for the Bush administration to shift course or construct a real policy for Iraq gained even greater volume.

In keeping with the strategy, Washington now is feeling pressure from all sides to engage Tehran — and, crucially, the Iranians have had to sacrifice nothing to achieve this position.

The Domestic Situation

That is not to say that the Iranians are invulnerable, of course — and the political situation inside the country is particularly worthy of consideration.

For the first time since Ahmadinejad came to power in June 2005, student protests over his presidency broke out Dec. 6, Dec. 8 and Dec. 11 in Tehran. Though the number of protesters dwindled from around 4,000 to about 50 over the course of a week, the fact that the demonstrations occurred at all is significant. Such demonstrations are rare inside Iran, and they speak to the fact that an undercurrent of opposition to the hard-line clerical regime still exists. Political moderates have been without a voice in the government since former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani lost his bid for election last year, and they now appear ready to make their presence felt once again.

An important milestone will be Dec. 15, when municipal officials and delegates to the Assembly of Experts (AoE) will be elected. These elections could bring Rafsanjani’s pragmatic conservatives into a power-sharing arrangement with Ahmadinejad’s ultraconservative faction. And, though a dramatic shift in Iran’s foreign policy should not be expected in the near term, the new AoE members will be highly significant in determining the future leadership of the regime: The group not only appoints Iran’s supreme leader, but also oversees his performance and even has the power to remove him from office. With many of the most senior members of the clerical regime in Iran now elderly and some ailing, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a generational shift is likely under the watch of the new AoE members, whose terms in office last for eight years.

Meanwhile, the government faces opposition from a variety of ethnic minorities — including Ahwazi Arabs in the southwest, Kurds and Azerbaijanis in the northwest, Balochis in the southeast and Turkmen in the north. Iranian leaders are well aware of the risk that these dissident groups could be utilized by foreign intelligence agencies seeking to destabilize the Iranian regime.

With such considerations in mind, it is little wonder that Iran’s maneuvers during the past six months or so have been particularly obvious. The regime not only has been moving adroitly to contribute to and exploit a period of relative U.S. weakness, but also acting with the recognition that it cannot play this game indefinitely. The clock is ticking, and the time for Iran to capitalize on its gains in the region is now.

Next Steps

Obviously, the ethnic makeup of the government in Baghdad is a crucial consideration for both Washington and Tehran.

One of the options the Bush administration currently is entertaining would involve revamping the Iraqi government leadership — meaning the removal of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the exclusion of Shiite figures loyal to al-Sadr. Though Bush has insisted publicly that al-Maliki is the “right man” to govern Iraq (much as he insisted Donald Rumsfeld was the “right man” to lead the Defense Department), al-Maliki has been losing favor among U.S. political and military leaders, who see him as an ineffective leader who is unwilling to disband the Shiite militias. The leak of a memo by national security adviser Stephen Hadley, which harshly criticized al-Maliki just ahead of his meeting with Bush in Amman, Jordan, could be an indication that the administration is pursuing a good-cop, bad-cop strategy to introduce the idea that al-Maliki is the wrong man for the job after all.

Al-Maliki is a member of Hizb al-Dawah, which ranks second in terms of influence within Iraq’s Shiite political bloc — behind the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the most staunchly pro-Iranian party. Thus, to counter SCIRI’s influence, al-Maliki has had to play various Shiite factions against each other in order to shore up his own party’s standing.

If al-Maliki were to be sacked, the heir apparent would seem to be SCIRI leader Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, who met with Bush on Dec. 5 at the White House. However, should al-Hakim choose to retain his position as kingmaker among the Iraqi Shia and avoid the challenges that a prime minister inevitably would face, Adel Abdel Mahdi — also a senior SCIRI member and one of Iraq’s two vice presidents — very well could take the job.

Installing a prime minister from SCIRI clearly would root the Iraqi government in the pro-Iranian camp, but this is not necessarily something Washington would dismiss out of hand. With someone like al-Hakim or Mahdi in power, the government could be expected to bring the largest and most sophisticated Shiite militia — SCIRI’s own Badr Brigade — under control. And both Washington and Tehran have an interest in putting an effective Shiite leader at the helm who can actually keep the level of sectarian violence propagated by Shiite militias under control.

But this plan has its drawbacks. Unlike the al-Sadr bloc, SCIRI has an insurance plan for its militant arm: With government control, it could more easily integrate the Badr Brigade into Iraq’s security forces — and effectively sideline al-Sadr’s Mehdi Army, which has been a major contributor to the lawlessness in Baghdad. The Mehdi militants would be sure to mount violent resistance to any deals that would sideline al-Sadr’s supporters in government.

If a bid to displace the al-Sadrites should succeed, however, some Iraqi and U.S. leaders are looking to strengthen Sunni standing in the government through Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi — the No. 2 leader of the Iraqi Accord Front, the largest Sunni party in the government. Sunni participation in the government remains a prerequisite if the government is to clamp down on the non-Shiite insurgency in Iraq. And as the pressure grows for the United States to shift strategy, pull away from day-to-day security responsibilities and engage in serious talks with Iran, the Sunni bloc in Iraq might see this is as their best chance to consolidate their position in the government before the Iranians get more control of the situation. It is no coincidence, then, that al-Hashimi traveled to Washington earlier this week for a meeting with Bush — three weeks ahead of schedule — as the rumors of a new power-sharing agreement involving SCIRI spread.

The diplomatic problem the United States now is facing brings to mind the words of President John F. Kennedy: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” At this point, Bush knows he cannot negotiate with Iran out of fear, and so he is delaying negotiations by shopping for recommendations on military strategy and mulling over ways to revamp the political leadership in Baghdad.

Washington’s strategy clearly is not yet set — and as the ISG noted publicly, not all of the options have yet been exhausted. New political deals certainly can be forged — but as history has shown, deals in Baghdad have a tendency to spark even larger conflagrations if and when they break apart. Washington can attempt to reshuffle the cards within the Iraqi government in a variety of ways, but in the end, it will be terribly difficult for the administration to ignore that Iran has most of the chips and is unlikely to fold.

Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.

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Peter Finn’s article for the Washington Post - In Russia, a Secretive Force Widens - has received quite a lot of attention in the last 24 hours or so. Deservedly so, for it’s an important one. It begins by reminding us that three recent senior appointments - Oleg Safonov as deputy head of the Russian Interior Ministry, Yevgeny Shkolov as head of its economic security department, and Valery Golubev as a deputy chief executive at Gazprom - have confirmed a tendency that has been noted for some time now by Russia-watchers: all three of these men are former KGB officers and were colleagues of Vladimir Putin, either in his days as a KGB operative in East Germany, or later as a career politician in the local government of St Petersburg:

Russia’s intertwined political and business elites are increasingly populated with people like them, former intelligence agents who have personally proved themselves to the president. At the same time, Putin has spearheaded the regrouping and strengthening of the country’s security services, which had splintered into a host of agencies after the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.

In particular, the Federal Security Service, known by its Russian initials FSB, has emerged as one of the country’s most powerful and secretive forces, with an increasingly international mission. Putin headed the agency in the 1990s.

“If in the Soviet period and the first post-Soviet period, the KGB and FSB [people] were mainly involved in security issues, now half are still involved in security but the other half are involved in business, political parties, NGOs, regional governments, even culture,” said Olga Kryshtanovskaya, director of the Moscow-based Center for the Study of Elites. “They started to use all political institutions.”

Kryshtanovskaya recently analyzed the official biographies of 1,016 leading political figures — departmental heads of the presidential administration, all members of the government, all deputies of both houses of parliament, the heads of federal units and the heads of regional executive and legislative branches. She found that 26 percent had reported serving in the KGB or its successor agencies.

Axisglobe has some in-depth reports on the subject, linked to from this news bulletin, which among other things highlights the Center’s finding that

78% of leading political figures, heads of departments of the Presidential administration, all members of the government and members of both chambers of parliament, heads of federal structures and heads of executive power and legislature in regions, somehow in their career have been connected with the KGB or the organizations that had come to replace it.

INFORMATION AGENCY “FOR HUMAN RIGHTS”

All-Russia Public Movement “For Human Rights” Executive Director Lev Ponomarev

Room 21, Bldg 1, House 7, M. Kislovsky Pereulok, Moscow, 125009 Tel: (095)291-62-33, Tel/Fax: (095)291-70-11, e-mail: info@zaprava.ru

http://www.zaprava.ru

CHRONICLES OF POLITICAL PERSECUTION IN PRESENT DAY RUSSIA

News, statements, appeals, analysis, commentaries
Issue No. 44 (89)

4 December 2006 Special issue

“A very serious group created”

Open letters from Mikhail Trepashkin:
1) To Mr Alexander Litvinenko
2) They’re strangulating us like puppies!
3) The silence of the human rights advocates

(the original Russian text is available here)

1) To Mr Alexander Valterovich Litvinenko

Dear Alexander,

I’m sorry to hear that you have been poisoned but I think that failure to act in the face of specific evidence of attempts on your life is partially to blame for this. In particular, as far back as August 2002, I reported about a meeting I had near the Kitay-gorod metro station with former officer of the URPO [Department of Countermeasures Against and Prevention of the Activities of Organized Criminal Formations] FSB RF Mr V.V. Shebalin (at his request). At that meeting, he declared that he was once again working for the USB [Department of Internal Security] FSB RF (USB officer D.A. Paramonov took him on communication through Mr Vitvinov) and that “a very serious group” had been created that would “f*ck everybody connected with Berezovsky and Litvinenko”. He told me that if I stepped aside from the house bombing case and started cooperating with the group, I would be “left in peace”. At the same time, he asked me to give him information about your father and another relative (I don’t remember whom exactly), both living in Biryulyovo. I answered him then that I absolutely can’t stomach dirty violence, and especially murders. I clearly understood that it had been decided to gradually bump off your kin, masking the evidence of murder. If they are alive, it is because I immediately brought the fact of his criminal proposal to public notice. Recall that I told you about this as well, but a reaction did not follow. But you should have demanded an investigation.

During the course of that meeting, I told V.V. Shebalin: “Forget about A.V. Litvinenko! He’s in London. And enough with these dirty affairs to settle personal accounts. There are affairs more important for the FSB RF – a field commander of Salman Raduyev’s who goes by the alias of Abdul and was earlier detained by me has appeared in Moscow. He is a specialist in terrorist operations. N.P. Patrushev ordered his release in December 1995. Then he tore off to Turkey, but promised to gather forces and return, having shot down me, Gagayev, and Shevchenko. And now here he is in Moscow; Alexander Yevstigneyev saw him. In addition to this, I know from clients (Trepashkin’s law clients. – Ed.) that many armed Chechens have appeared since May of 2002 in the Western and South-Western districts (of Moscow – Ed.), and that they’re audaciously meeting together, fearlessly showing up at these gatherings with weapons. Something’s afoot, and immediate work needs to be done in this direction, not settling accounts with Litvinenko!” I then gave Shebalin (for the FSB RF) information from 1995-1996 with “Abdul’s” old places of residence and his contacts. But they did not react at the FSB RF. The events at the House of Culture on Dubrovka (“Nord-Ost”) exploded, leading to 130 deaths of hostages.

The episode of the meeting with Shebalin and the warnings about a terrorist act being organized has been imputed to me as the divulging of a state secret, disclosing information about the plans of the FSB RF! As I understood, questions of the pursuit of B.A. Berezovsky and A.V. Litvinenko, as well as of their supporters in Russia, were put by the authorities in a more important place than the prevention of terrorist acts in Moscow. Or maybe “Nord-Ost” is also a part of the plans of the FSB RF? And then deputy procurator-general of the RF Kolesnikov raised the dusty old events having to do with contracts for “Zhigulis”, in order to get Berezovsky. They arbitrarily locked me up in jail and are holding me in isolation behind barbed wire going on four years already. And calmly (in the calm atmosphere of the “people-loving” Russian “rule-of-law” state, as it is presented in the international arena), according to a separate plan, they decided to get to you, Alexander Valterovich! If you continue to do nothing more than spew out slogans, instead of describing concrete proof, and keep silent with respect to the facts set forth, then they will destroy you! By the way, I’m concerned that some kind of information blockade has been organized with respect to my case as well. I write a lot of concrete things, but nothing gets placed, not only in the central mass media, but even on my sites. Although in March of this year, in response to my appeal, B.A. Berezovsky promised to help with coverage of my case in the mass media.

However, quite to the contrary, I was isolated even by defenders and human rights advocates! I do not object to the publication of this letter in the mass media.

With respect and empathy

M.I. Trepashkin
20 November 2006

P.S. Since my letters often don’t reach their intended addressee, please confirm receipt of this letter, if only with a single sentence.

2). They’re strangulating us like puppies!

In 1998, there was a big article in one of the central newspapers entitled “They Will Strangulate Us Like Puppies”. In it, officer of the URPO FSB RF lieutenant-colonel A.V. Litvinenko expressed h is prognosis after the famous press conference by officers of the named administration that took place on 17 November 1998 at “Interfax”, at which he, together with work colleagues colonel V.V. Shebalin (the man in the mask), major A.V. Pon’kin, senior lieutenant Konstantin Latyshonok and German Shcheglov told about how the leadership of the FSB RF had instructed them to abduct and murder people. In particular, they told about three instances of crimes that had been arranged on the orders of former FSB RF director N.D. Kovalev (currently a deputy to the State Duma of Russia), generals Khokhol’kov, Makarychev and others:

1) the murder of CIS executive secretary B.A. Berezovsky;
2) the abduction of businessman U. Djabrailov for the purposes of obtaining a ransom;
3) the physical elimination of me (at that time I was head of the investigative branch of the UFSNP RF for Moscow Oblast).

I will note that in addition to the 5 (five) URPO FSB RF officers, more than 7 additional persons confirmed the fact that an act of violence was being organized with respect to me, including FSB RF officers lieutenant-colonels Gusak, Skryabin, Yermolov, Kruglov, and others. Because prior to this I had been summoned to the Main Military Procuracy, where they had familiarized me with a series of documents on attempts on my life that were being arranged, including with statements by many FSB RF officers addressed to the head of the Administration of the President of Russia, I agreed to participate on 17 November 1998 in the famous press conference as an intended victim of a murder attempt. Unfortunately, in the mass media I was grouped together with the FSB RF officers who had been contracted to physically eliminate Berezovsky.

This was untrue, and caused confusion in the publications, as well as negative consequences in my subsequent fate. Litvinenko was asked then: what can you expect for yourself after such high-profile revelations? He replied: if there isn’t good support, then the criminal murderer-generals will fire us, and then will strangulate us like puppies! The solidarity of the generals and big money did their deed. In addition, V.V. Putin and N.P. Patrushev (who had arrived at different times in the FSB RF from the GPU of the Administration of the President of the RF) suddenly burst into power, and it was necessary to reinforce the authority of state security. The revelations impeded this. Who is going to let someone saw through the legs of their trampoline? And they started to strangulate everyone involved with the 17 November 1998 press conference like puppies, to get rid of them like so much unneeded waste.

A.V. Litvinenko spent time in the “Lefortovo” SIZO and in Butyrki, went through many charges, and, as a result, 3 years 6 months of deprivation of liberty, suspended, for questionable acts and flight to London. And now he’s been killed! All of the “revelators” without exception were fired from the FSB RF.

A.I. Gusak was convicted, and also given a suspended sentence (they scraped together what they could under orders).

Field work on the victims as well continued. Berezovsky was forced to emigrate. Trofimov (former FSB general – Ed.) was murdered in Moscow (he sent Litvinenko in 1994 to investigate the first attempt on Berezovsky’s life, as the result of which they became friends). I was locked up, and for a fourth year already I’m being held in places of deprivation of liberty under a special regime of isolation on a fabricated charge!

The only one who lucked out is the spineless coward V.V. Shebalin. Knowing that there’s a series of serious crimes behind his shoulders (unlike the other participants in the press conference), and having understood that Berezovsky is not going to help him become a general (which he very much counted on when he became one of the leaders of the group of “revelators”), Shebalin threw himself at the feet of the sleazy FSB RF officers and offered to function as an agent provocateur for the USB FSB RF and a false witness against Litvinenko and his circle. They took the bastard! He saved his hide. And even got into the group developing schemes to destroy both Litvinenko himself and his supporters.

M.I. Trepashkin 24.11.2006

The officially voiced hypothesis about A.V. Litvinenko having been murdered because he “often appeared in the company of Chechen separatist emissary Akhmed Zakayev” looks funny. The fact is that Litvinenko and Zakayev had lodgings in close proximity to one another in England. They were neighbours! And as Russian-speaking refugees, they associated with one another. When taking some kind of interview or asking for a comment on some kind of event, representatives of the mass media, as a rule, invited both “political refugees”. And so they would show up together These are logical and fully explainable circumstances. But to stress this, as though they were accomplices, isn’t exactly right. If we follow such a hypothesis, then Zakayev himself should have been the first to be poisoned. Or am I wrong?

M.I. Trepashkin
24.11.2006

3) “ But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong: and they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied; they also that render evil for good are mine adversaries; because I follow the thing that good is” (Psalm of David, 37).

I greatly regret that the human rights advocates did not give due attention to what A.V. Litvinenko was talking about way back in April 1998, when he, being an officer of the URPO FSB RF and clearly risking his job, together with his colleagues A.I. Gusak and A.V. Pon’kin, gave a revealing interview to ORT television channel journalist Sergey Leonidovich Dorenko about crimes by the leaders of the FSB RF, including about murders committed by the hands of both FSB RF officers and their agents.

Nor was there a proper response when participants in the notorious press conference at “Interfax” on 17 November 1998, at which officers of that same URPO FSB RF A.V. Litvinenko, V.V. Shebalin, K. Latyshonok, G. Shcheglov, and A.V. Pon’kin told about contract murders and abductions of people committed upon the orders of the leadership of the FSB RF – N.D. Kovalev, Ye.G. Khokhol’kov, generals Makarychev, Ovchinnikov and others – were subjected to unprecedented pursuit. Didn’t believe that such a thing can be? It all was limited to general phrases in the mass media from both sides. Nobody stopped to analyze the concrete proof. The participants in the press conference had it, and the criminal-authorities’ side didn’t. And everybody, like zombies, toed the line proposed by the authorities: it’s not worth it to make a noise around the revelations. And that’s exactly what the authorities needed.

Then – as a consequence of impunity – there followed the blowing up of the houses in September 1999, “Nord-Ost” and a series of other bloody crimes, where the guilt of the special services was obvious. Somehow everybody believed the fairy tales about the solving of these crimes!

Maybe the death of A.V. Litvinenko, who fell as a victim of vengeance with impunity, will finally force those who are engaged in protecting human rights to pay attention to the specifics of what is going on? After all, the specifics will show the falseness of the authorities! There is extreme vexation on my soul in connection with the death of A.V. Litvinenko. Yes, vexation! The same kind of vexation as after the murder of A.S. Politkovskaya. I’ve had empathy for them for nearly 10 years. And now – vexation because the wimpy and unorganized human rights movement of Russia is incapable of effectively preventing neither political murders nor the protection of persons being pursued by the authorities for political motives (apparently this ought to read “preventing pursuit for political motives” – Ed.), nor other crimes by high state officials against people. Weakness because of disunity, some kind of dissentions, often fear – these are but a few of the reasons for the passivity of the human rights advocates.

Together with A.V. Litvinenko, I was a participant in the press conference of 17 November 1998. I was already no longer an officer of the organs of state security, I was unfamiliar until October 1998 with the officers of the URPO FSB RF who appeared at the press conference. I was invited as a victim of a murder being arranged by FSB RF officers because earlier I had brought attention to crimes being committed by FSB RF officers with the knowledge of management. For this they fired me from the FSB RF and organized attempts on my life many a time, including with the forces of the URPO FSB RF.

The murderers succeeded in dousing the wave of scandal without hindrance! The human rights advocates, even though they had some doubts, kept silent! And then the victims started falling! Among others, the revelators are dying, and those who were the targets of the criminal endeavours (the authorities continued to murder and pursue them).

For 11 years I’m warring almost by myself with criminals from among the high-level officials in the special services against people, residents of Moscow and Russia as a whole, against children. In October 2003, the plan of the FSB RF which Gusak, Litvinenko, and Pon’kin told ORT about way back in April 1998 was carried out calmly, cold-bloodedly, and with impunity – a pistol and cartridges were slipped into my belongings, so as to lock me up and shut me up. They held me in a cell with chemicals –insecticide powder, persuaded (apparently, this ought to be read as “threatened” – Ed.) to stab me with a sharpened screwdriver, and placed me in conditions constantly inducing allergy.

And everybody’s waiting to see how long I can hold out. The hangmen are waiting, and, what’s vexing, so are the human rights advocates. For their reaction to clearly evident lawlessness is very weak. In the main, individual people are protesting. There are no appeals to the structures of the Council of Europe and the UN against the criminal lawlessness.

I’m in the following position:

“For dogs have compassed me: the assembly of the wicked have inclosed me: they pierced my hands and my feet” (Psalm 21).

And I ask of help, but ever it comes not.

I am being held in a SIZO, IVS, and zone for a fourth year already, not having committed anything unlawful against people. All of my charges (apparently, this ought to be read as “charges against me” – Ed.) are concocted! And this can be seen even with the eye of a non-lawyer. But for a fourth year I can not tell people what I’m sitting behind barbed wire for, i.e. what the hangmen have concocted for me! Even defenders and human rights advocates are keeping me in some kind of informational blockade, very advantageous for the authorities, so as to pour dirt on me and pressure me in the zone. If it weren’t for the silence, and it were publicised through the central mass media what specific acts the criminals from authority have locked me up behind bars for, then the criminal case would have been reviewed a long time ago.

Litvinenko, I – we’re not the last in the chain of those being pursued. You remain silent? Tomorrow any one of you may find yourself in this chain. Think about it. And, perhaps, Litvinenko’s death will force you to believe in the reality of what he spoke about! Believe and begin to take more decisive action. I had warned A.V. Litvinenko about the creation way back in 2002 of a group for his destruction.

Even earlier, I described a concrete situation about the use in the FSB RF of special poisons for the physical destruction of people. Already in 1994, certain of the officers of the VKR were sneaking these poisons out from development sites and were attempting to sell them to businessmen they knew for the elimination of competitors.

On this they got burned, running up against the agents of the FSB RF. These poisons do not leave traces in the organism. Most often, autopsy results list cardiac failure as the cause of death of those poisoned. The poison is usually applied by aerosol or with a brush to the steering wheel and door handles of an automobile, in a place where an air conditioner is working, on telephone receivers, and so forth. In the instance described by me, there were 10 kinds of poisons of various effect (through the respiratory passages, through the skin of the hands, through the conjunctiva of the eyes, and so forth). Traces of such poisons are present in the case of the murder of Kivelidi, Shchekochikhin, and others. It can not be ruled out that such poisons have been used for the murder of A.V. Litvinenko. Be silent. And you’ll be next.

M.I. Trepashkin
23 November 2006

(see also: The Trepashkin Letters

Mikhail Trepashkin)

In Eurasia Daily Monitor, analyst Andrei Smirnov discusses a little-publicized series of visits by Russia-based senior Iranian and U.S. diplomats to localities in the North Caucasus region which took place earlier this month.

U.S. Ambassador William Burns was in the North Caucasus from December 4-5, visiting Nalchik, the capital of Kabardino-Balkaria, as well as Vladikavkaz and Beslan in North Ossetia. On December 7 Iran’s Ambassador Gholam-Reza Ansari visited Dagestan.

Smirnov points out that

The simultaneous appearance of the Iranian and U.S. diplomats in the North Caucasus was hardly a coincidence; the program and purposes of both visits looked almost identical. Burns and Ansari both discussed economic issues with local leaders.

The visits, which concentrated on the particular cultural, political, civil-society and economic interests which Washington and Teheran have in the region, appear to have been co-ordinated by Moscow:

The North Caucasus remains the Kremlin’s most painful issue, and foreign diplomats in Russia are usually very cautious when dealing with this topic. The Russian side likely initiated these visits, but analysts are divided on why. Although there have not been any major rebel raids in the Caucasus in 2006, the Kremlin continues to face severe economic and security problems in its effort to control the region.

——-

On paper, a troika consisting of Russia, the United States, and Iran could function in the North Caucasus. At the moment all sides seem keen to cooperate in the region. “I am convinced that we have much to gain by working together,” Burns told residents of Kabardino-Balkaria. At the same time Ansari told the Dagestani president, “If in comparison with other parts of Russia, Dagestan and Iran are united not only by the common borders, but also by a common culture, this creates a good basis for good-neighborly cooperation (RIA-Dagestan, December 7).

Ray Thomas of the Open University is currently trying to revive the UK Russian Studies email list, which looks as though it could be an interesting and worthwhile forum for exchanging opinions on the current situation affecting Russia and the West.

The list - which is rather low-voume - can be joined at the UK jiscmail site. I’ve now joined it.

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/russian-studies.html

To give an idea of the sort of discussion that’s currently underway on the list, I’ve appended a few recent messages:

—–Original Message—–
From: On all aspects of Russia and the FSU [mailto:RUSSIAN-STUDIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of ray thomas
Sent: Tuesday, December 05, 2006 11:17 PM
To: RUSSIAN-STUDIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: KGBfication

Discussion of the Litvinenko assassination seem to have uncovered further layers of KGBfication within the Russian Government. The assertions that dissidents should not have the right to live in Britain, for example, shows a lamentable ignorance of what civil liberties means in Western democracies. It seems likely that these uncoverings will continue to be part of public discussions in the mass media for a number of weeks. Until the situation has become more stable we don’t have a special need for the atmosphere of this list for calmer and more thoughtful contributions.

But the usual situation is that reports and other sources of information on Russia in the UK are not plentiful. Understanding of developments in Russia, as Oleg has indicated, is limited. We should keep in mind the great potential of this list to contribute to understanding other developments in Russia. I think that this list could do much more in the way of providing useful information and discussion on Russia.

I was surprised, for example, that there has been no review or other kind of mention of Georgi Derluguian’s book ‘Bourdieu’s Secret Admirer in the Caucasus’, Chicago UP 2005, on this list. Derluguian’s book seems to me a notable and entertaining academic book that raises the level of commentary and interpretations of developments in Russian and the former Soviet states.

Has anyone else on this list read Derluguian’s book? Did they not think it worthy of mention on a list entitled Russian Studies?
My main source of information on developments in Russia has been postings on the chechnya-sl@yahoogroups.com list. Postings are published daily and they go back to the first Chechnya war in 1996. There are a great variety of postings from many countries. The subject matter of many of these posting extends well beyond Chechnya, and events in Chechnya often seem to presage events in other parts of Russia. But the Chechnya list has come to serve purposes very different from those of this list. A much earlier version of chechnya-sl was a discussion list, but the passions expressed led to abusive messages and ‘flaring’. All messages nowadays go through the moderator. Most messages are postings from newspapers with relatively few original messages expressing the views or knowledge of their originators. If messages go through a moderator the stimulus of immediacy is lost and there is little incentive to discussion. Another problem with the Chechnya list is the large volume of messages.

The Russian-studies list does not focus on Chechnya and could perform a complementary role to the Chechnya list by encouraging original messages, messages with references to and comments on published documents on Russia and a modest amount of discussion.

This list has 280 members. But the members do not include Derluguian. Nor do they include David McDuff or Jeremy Putley who contribute a lot to the Chechnya list, Nor Premen Addy, an Oxford colleague of Oleg’s and of Sasha Antonyuk, who gave an excellent and very up-to-date WEA Course on Russian History in Milton Keynes this term. Might the list-owner invite these individuals to join the list? I am confident that they could make useful contributions and they may not know that this list is active.

For those not familiar wwith the jiscmail system I should explain that you can get list of members by sending the one line message: review russian-studies
To jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk

I note that there are 15 members with .RU suffixes and 8 who conceal their address and identify. It would be nice to think that these hidden members are FSB/KGB ‘observers’ who can convey something of the atmosphere of a free discussion to their benighted colleagues.

Best wishes to all

Ray Thomas, Open University, Milton Keynes

******************************************************

—–Original Message—–
From: On all aspects of Russia and the FSU [mailto:RUSSIAN-STUDIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of ray thomas
Sent: Friday, December 01, 2006 10:02 AM
To: RUSSIAN-STUDIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: Re: KGBfication

Thanks Oleg. I’d be very pleased to be purged of KGBfication. The invitation to Oxford as part of this process is well appreciated. In principle I can come at any time and I look forward to the occasion But there are a few matters I’d like to discuss on this list as part of preliminaries.

The first is to point out that Putin has a much more urgent need to be purged of KGBfication. He has shit rather than egg on his face as result of the vehemence of his denials of any Russian government involvement in the Litvinenko poisoning.

Putin’s denials appears to have had the effect of telling FSB staff and Russian government staff not to cooperate with the UK. The BBC yesterday afternoon emanated almost a little bit of glee in noting the high level of cooperation between the NHS, the HSA and British Airways on tracing radiation trails and, almost pointedly, did not mention any cooperation by Russian authorities.

The BBC presented the issue as one of public health. So Russia came out as not interested in questions of public health. Some people in the UK are aware that, even without the assassinations that get a lot of attention in the media, Russians having a lower expectation of life than those who live in any other country of Europe. The absence of Russia from this discussion on public helath supported the perception that life is cheap in Russia. That is another perception I would like to be purged of. But where is the evidence that life is not regarded as cheap in Russia?

By his denials Putin effectively muzzled himself and muzzled his staff in commenting on the ongoing Litvinenko investigation. Anatoly Safonov, Putin’s counter-terrorism adviser, told Reuters yesterday: “As we said before, we are open and willing to offer all the help needed”. Reid said Moscow had promised cooperation to the “highest level”. (see: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L30722085.htm). Neither Safonov’s nor Reids words have much meaning. When was that earlier offer of help? Is Safanov the “highest level”?

The problem seems to be that the Putinisms have been used up. The suicide suggestion did not pass the test of public credibility, There is no longer any point in trying to divert attention by asking what the UK is doing because an inquest has started and British police are busy investigating the radiation trail. The BBC pointed out that the radiation trails lead to Moscow. There is no longer much point in trying to involve Berezovsky because flying between to Moscow is one thing Berezovski would not do.

Reid said “There certainly will be no political prohibition on the police following where the evidence leads them.” But Reid is referring to Britain and British police. Reid has no control over political prohibition by Putin or the FSB.. That means that at the end of the Brtish investigation many questions will be left without any intelligent response from Russian authorities. Just as in the matter the scale of casualties at Beslan and in the Theatre siege, as in the matter of the perpetrators of the destroyed flats, as in the turmoil in Chechnya we shall be left without an answer to the question ‘??? ????????’

It hould be noted that such KGBfication even threatens civil liberties in the UK. Conservative leaders here were yesterday calling for the refusal of asylum to ‘dissidents’.

What suggestions does Oleg - and others on this list - have to find ways of divorcing Putin from KGBfication of the landscape?

Ray Thomas, Social Sciences, Open University
*****************************************

—–Original Message—–
From: On all aspects of Russia and the FSU [mailto:RUSSIAN-STUDIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK] On Behalf Of Oleg Golubchikov
Sent: Wednesday, November 29, 2006 5:49 PM
To: RUSSIAN-STUDIES@JISCMAIL.AC.UK
Subject: KGBfication

I am pleased to see change in Ray Thomas’s discursive attitude in his latest messages to the poster. His tone has obviously changed, and he starts using comparative and academic-like perspectives – a far cry from his two original posts. I am particularly pleased to hear his call for penetrating the layers of journalistic mediocrity to discover a broader picture. It was exactly my intention to inform the public about some developments that were hidden from journalistic immediacy. Unfortunately, Ray Thomas’s is not yet comfortable to divorce himself from a KGBfication of the landscape on which the coverage of Russia is often taking place, but this is hardly a surprise given both the legacy of the Cold War thinking among the public in the West and the popularity of various conspiracy theories in this part of the world (there is, for example, a whole array of literature following Hofstadter’s “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” – although I am not familiar if literature of this sort exists in the British context).

I, however, admit it can be difficult to change one’s attitude based on a forum like this and it might be worth discussing such issues based on a more direct dialogue. I would therefore like to invite Ray Thomas to meet for a discussion. The Oxford academic atmosphere, for example, may stimulate a productive dialogue. The discussion can be done in various formats, including a meeting with the Oxford University Russian Society or in more private environment if he would like.

Oleg Golubchikov, Oxford University

A report in the Guardian focuses on the threat to Britain’s energy security posed by the Kremlin’s new policies. Though much has already been written in the Western press about the impending Sakhalin-2 takeover by Gazprom, which now looks like a reality, and the trumped-up environmental accusations against BP (which are part of an ongoing attempt by the Russian government to seize back assets that were handed over to foreign energy companies when prices were low), the implications for Britain’s domestic natural gas supply are serious, and the article goes into some of the details.

This appears to be just one more area in which Russia is consciously and deliberately positioning itself against Europe. As the Kremlin launches its new round of “public relations offensives”, most recently in the press conference given by Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov in London yesterday, observers continue to be puzzled by the obvious contradictions in Russian foreign policy. While Peskov complained about “damage to Russia’s reputation” over the Litvinenko affair, and expressed horror and a sense of being “taken aback by the willingness to point the finger at Russia”, his government continued to do all in its power to encourage such damage and finger-pointing - threatening western media and journalists with lawsuits, using using legal pretexts to cover what is really the expropriation of private resources in the energy sector, encouraging Iran in its nuclear ambitions, blocking Western initiatives at the UN, and so on.

It may be that there is a power struggle in the Kremlin, and that the contradictions and dichotomies in official Russian policy towards its neighbours and the rest of the world are currently reflecting that struggle - but there is also a growing impression that what we are witnessing is a carefully orchestrated series of moves and counter-moves, whose primary aim is to confuse and darken the view. As Edward Lucas wrote recently:

But the only thing that is really certain is that we do not know the truth. Russia’s security services are masters in the art of maskirovka” [camouflage]. Whether the aim is to manipulate opinion in Russia or abroad, or to intimidate critics, or something else, enough false clues will be strewn that we are unlikely to see what is really going on until it is too late.

Via Prague Watchdog (my translation):

The war in Chechnya began 12 years ago

By Umalt Chadayev


At dawn on December 11 1994 federal forces were transferred from Daghestan, Ingushetia and North Ossetia to the territory of the Chechen Republic. At the time, the Kremlin called this operation “the restoration of constitutional order".

The formal pretext for the start of the military operation in Chechnya was the defeat of the forces of the puppet "Anti-Dudayev Opposition", which with the active support of Russian tanks and aircraft had attempted on November 26 to seize the city Grozny and overthrow Dzhokhar Dudayev, President of the Chechen Republic and former Soviet air force general. The assault on the Chechen capital met with complete failure, and Moscow decided to carry out a large-scale military invasion of the republic.

In the autumn of 1994 there was much talk about the approaching conflict. On November 22 the State Defence Committee of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria created on the order of Dzhokhar Dudayev accused the Russian leadership of unleashing a war against the Chechen Republic. Information obtained by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria (which at that time were headed by former Russian army colonel Aslan Maskhadov) showed that a concentration of Russian military units and heavy armour was taking place in Stavropol Krai, near the administrative boundary with Chechnya.

On November 23, Russian aviation subjected the city of Shali and a tank regiment deployed on its outskirts to an aerial rocket bombardment. Two days later, the Sheikh Mansur (Severny) Airport near the city of Grozny was also the target of an air strike.

On the morning of November 26, armed detachments of the so-called Chechen Temporary Soviet (headed by a former officer of the USSR Interior Ministry, Umar Avturkhanov, mayor of Chechnya’s Nadterechny district) attacked Grozny with the support of Russian helicopters and tanks. Dudayev’s units destroyed the opposition forces which entered the capital, annihilating some twenty units of armour and taking approximately the same number of tanks, whose crews were made up of officers of elite Russian divisions – the Taman and Kantemirov.

On November 30, the Russian air force subjected the city of Grozny to a missile strike. On the same day, Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a secret decree "On Measures to Establish Constitutional Law and Enforce Laws in the Territory of the Chechen Republic", which provided for the introduction of a state of emergency and the disarming of Dudayev’s units.

On December 1, a delegation of Russian State Duma deputies arrived in Grozny. During the same day Grozny was subjected to another air strike. On December 6, a meeting took place in the settlement of Sleptsovskaya (on the territory of Ingushetia) between Dzhokhar Dudayev and Russia’s Minister of Defence, General Pavel Grachev. When the discussion was over, Grachev made a public announcement that there would be no war in Chechnya.

On December 9, Boris Yeltsin signed a decree "On Measures for the Suppression of the Activity of Illegal Armed Units on the Territory of the Chechen Republic and in the Ossetian-Ingush Conflict Zone". At the same time a resolution was passed by the Russian government providing for the use of force in Chechnya.

On the following day, the Russian Defence Minister signed a directive and order "On the Formation of a United Group of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to Disarm Illegal Armed Units on the Territory of the Chechen Republic". These documents provided for the transfer of troops to the territory of Chechnya, a blockade of Grozny, and the disarmament of Chechen armed units.

At dawn on December 11 units of the Russian army and Russian Interior Ministry troops entered Chechnya from Ingushetia, Daghestan and North Ossetia. This occurred despite the fact that on December 12 talks were due to take place in Ossetia between representatives of Ichkerian President Dzhokhar Dudayev and the government of Russia.

Thus began the "first Chechen war", which cost the lives of tens of thousands of Chechnya’s innocent civilians and soldiers of the federal forces. According to different estimations, as many as 30,000 Russian servicemen and Chechen fighters perished in the course of this military campaign on the republic’s territory, and up to 75,000 innocent civilians.

Little more than a year after the beginning of the war, Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed as the result of an aerial rocket attack. A few months after his death, Alexander Lebed, Secretary of Russia’s Security Council, met in the Daghestani city of Khasav-Yurt with Aslan Maskhadov, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, and they signed a peace agreement which put an end to the "first" war.

In the autumn of 1999 another war began in Chechnya, one which in the number of casualties and the scale of destruction exceeded the first military campaign and, actually, continues to this day.


Translated by David McDuff.

According to Russia Today TV, the Russian government is threatening to file libel suits against international journalists over their reporting on the Litvinenko poisoning.

From WikiNews:

According to a report posted late Friday on the Russia Today TV web site, the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media is gathering publications worldwide to be studied for libelous and offensive comments against Russia in their coverage of the Litvinenko’s case. Russia Today TV reported that the Russian government intends to file law suits for libel against international media if there is evidence of journalistic misconduct.

MosNews has a resume of the Russia Today report.

WikiNews additionally reports:

FreeMediaOnline.org, a California-based nonprofit organization which monitors media and supports press freedom worldwide, said that the latest warnings issued by the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media would prove a major embarrassment for Putin and for Russia if they were carried out. An article on the FreeMediaOnline.org web site claims that even if there is no direct link between the two assassinations and the Kremlin, Putin is ultimately responsible for the climate of lawlessness and suppression of free media that may have contributed to these murders.

 

On December 11 1994, Russian military units invaded the territory of the Chechen Republic on the ostensible pretext of “restoring constitutional order”, and the “first” Chechen war began.

More from Aftenposten on the - by now rather unsuccessful-looking - attempt to discredit Alexander Litvinenko in London last week.

See also: Studying the Litvinenko Smear

The Daily Mirror has a report on new evidence which points to a near-certainty in the Litvinenko murder inquiry. Excerpt:

A £1.50 bus ticket proves that murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in a London hotel.

The ticket for a No 134 London bus was found in Litvinenko’s coat pocket after he was dosed with deadly polonium 210.

It was bought near his home in Muswell Hill, North London, from where he travelled to meetings in the West End on November 1.

Checks reveal that the bus he boarded has not been contaminated by radiation.

This, police say, almost certainly proves Litvinenko was poisoned at London’s Millennium Hotel where he drank tea that day with former colleagues Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi.

The formidable Charles Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post about “That Murder In London”:

The poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, renegade Russian spy and fierce critic of Vladimir Putin’s government, is everywhere being called a mystery. There is dark speculation about unnamed “rogue elements” either in the Russian secret services or among ultranationalists acting independently of the government. There are whispers about the indeterminacy of things in the shadowy netherworld of Russian exile politics, crime and espionage.

Well, you can believe in indeterminacy. Or you can believe the testimony delivered on the only reliable lie detector ever invented — the deathbed — by the victim himself. Litvinenko directly accused Putin of killing him.

Litvinenko knew more about his circumstances than anyone else. And on their deathbeds, people don’t lie. As Machiavelli said (some attribute this to Voltaire), after thrice refusing the entreaties of a priest to repent his sins and renounce Satan, “At a time like this, Father, one tries not to make new enemies.”

In science, there is a principle called Occam’s razor. When presented with competing theories for explaining a natural phenomenon, one adopts the least elaborate. Nature prefers simplicity. Scientists do not indulge in grassy-knoll theories. You don’t need a convoluted device to explain Litvinenko’s demise.

Do you think Anna Politkovskaya, the journalist who was investigating the war in Chechnya, was shot dead in her elevator by rogue elements? What about Viktor Yushchenko, the presidential candidate in Ukraine and eventual winner, poisoned with dioxin during the campaign, leaving him alive but disfigured? Ultranationalist Russians?

Opponents of Putin have been falling like flies. Some jailed, some exiled, some killed. True, Litvinenko’s murder will never be traced directly to Putin, no matter how dogged the British police investigation. State-sponsored assassinations are almost never traceable to the source. Too many cutouts. Too many layers of protection between the don and the hit man

Read it all.

Via Sky News:

Updated: 11:11, Sunday December 10, 2006

Nine mental patients have died after a fire swept through a psychiatric hospital in the second major blaze in Russia in two days.

Hospital officials tried to put out the fire at the clinic in the town of Taiga in the Kemerovo region in central Siberia.

Emergency services were not called until 90 minutes after the fire broke out, a government spokesman said.

Fifteen patients were taken to hospital, said Valery Korchagin, a spokesman for the Emergency Situations Ministry.

On Saturday, 45 women were killed in a fire at a Moscow drug treatment centre killed 45.

Update: Authorities are naming arson as the most likely cause of the blaze, according to Lenta.ru. Lenta.ru also mentions a third arson attack,on a mental hospital in Tver Oblast.

The Daily Telegraph has published a report on the letters it has received from Mikhail Trepashkin, who is currently serving a 4-year prison sentence in Russia, ostensibly for divulging state secrets. The letters were smuggled out of Russia and passed on to the newspaper after Litvinenko's death. They were sent to him shortly before he died, warning him of a plot to kill him.

Since the Russian authorities have forbidden British detectives investigating Litvinenko’s murder to interview Mr Trepashkin, the letters now acquire even greater significance. An excerpt from the report:

Mr Trepashkin says that Litvinenko had refused to murder both him and Mr Berezovsky. He claims that there is an FSB document, entitled “Facts about an attempt on the life of Berezovsky”, that will confirm what he says. In a letter dated November 30, Mr Trepashkin describes how he met Litvinenko in October 1998 with FSB “hit men” who said the head of the secret police and two named generals had instructed them to kill Mr Trepashkin and Litvinenko by “breaking their skulls”. He adds: “Litvinenko was forced to flee to England to save his and his family’s lives. He did not betray his Motherland. He was hiding from the bandits who came to power.”

Mr Trepashkin is urging the West to put pressure on Russia to hold an open investigation into Litvinenko’s death and into his own “fabricated” conviction under state secrecy laws.

Via the Sunday Times:

While Tony Blair is anxious that relations with Moscow do not suffer irreversible damage in the affair [of Alexander Litvinenko’s murder] , Russian dissidents insist he adopts a tougher line. Vladimir Bukovsky, the leading Russian dissident in London, said: “We expect the British government to respond properly. Instead, we hear that our so-called prime minister told his colleagues that the priority is to retain good and friendly relations with Russia.

“What is this? A licence to kill? An open invitation to come and murder anyone Russia wishes as long as we have positive relations. Prime minister, you are wrong. Your prime duty as prime minister is to defend the citizens of this country and its sovereignty.”

Marina Litvinenko, Alexander Litvinenko’s widow, has said she believes the Russian authorities could be behind her husband’s murder. The Daily Mail has a long and exclusive interview with her. Excerpt:

She says: “Sasha was a very emotional person. He could blame Putin. Obviously it was not Putin himself, of course not. But what Putin does around him in Russia makes it possible to kill a British person on British soil. I believe that it could have been the Russian authorities.

‘I will tell the police everything I can’

“The Russian authorities have not yet been in touch with me yet but I know they are planning their own investigation. I do not think that I will help them with their investigations. I can’t believe that they will tell the truth. I can’t believe if they ask about evidence they will use it in the proper way.”

Instead, she is putting her trust in the British authorities. She says: “I have helped them and will tell the police everything I can. I believe that these are the people who will find out who murdered my husband and that is the most important thing to me.

“Now I will do everything I can for Sasha. I cannot be exactly like him but I can do everything to keep his good memory, the memory of a good friend, a good husband and a good father.

“Everything he did, he did it in full. In some way he was like a child. He believed people and he could only see the good in them.”

And it was that kind nature - the willingness to put his trust in people - that Marina Litvinenko believes killed her husband in the end.

The Sunday Times (UK) has a separate interview with Marina Litvinenko here.

And Sky News's Kay Burley has another interview here.

The video of the Sky interview is here.

From a recent AP report on the ongoing investigation of the murder of Alexander Litvinenko:

In Moscow, prosecutors said officials would travel to Britain as part of a Russian inquiry into the death, but did not confirm who would be questioned or when the interviews would take place.

Andrei Nekrasov, a friend of Litvinenko, said there was concern among emigres in the British capital that the Kremlin would use the inquiries as a “pretext to harass exiles in London.”

Litvinenko’s wife Marina and friend Alex Goldfarb were both prepared to meet Russian officials - but on the condition British police first tested the investigators for traces of polonium, Goldfarb said Saturday.

—–

British police said they had no details of the planned visit by Russian investigators and it was not immediately clear whether they would be given access to exiles granted political asylum by the British government.

Exiles in London feared the Russian investigators would seek to unsettle the emigre community, Nekrasov said.

He said that former Russian security officer Mikhail Trepashkin, serving a four-year prison sentence after being convicted of divulging state secrets, had said a Kremlin agent previously ordered to monitor Litvinenko was among those appointed to investigate the killing.

In what looks increasingly like another attack by fascist groups in Moscow, 45 women have died in a fire at a drugs rehabilitation centre (RFE/RL):

December 9, 2006 — Arson is being investigated as the possible cause of a fire that killed at least 45 female patients and staff at a drug-abuse treatment hospital in the Russian capital, Moscow.

Ten people were also injured, some of them seriously, and more than 100 people were evacuated.

The alarm came in at 1:42 a.m.local time. Officials say fire crews arrived in less than 10 minutes — and took only 20 minutes to extinguish the fire.

But it was still too long, as relatives of the dead wept today outside rehabilitation clinic No. 17 in southern Moscow.

Yury Nenashev, the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry’s top fire official, told reporters on the scene that he’s already “90 percent” certain the blaze was deliberately started.

“Now we can already say for sure that the fire started in the canteen area. We know where the fire started. And we are 90 percent certain that it was arson,” Nenashev said.

And Sky News adds:

In recent years, Russia has seen several fatal fires at secure hospitals where drug addicts or mentally ill people are treated. They are often in old, neglected buildings where patients are held in secure conditions.

As London’s streets turn radioactive, and the Kremlin blandly denies all responsibility, Edward Lucas re-examines the thesis that what the nations of the West now face in relation to Russia is a contemporary reworking of the historic 20th century conflict that was known as the Cold War:

Like analogies involving the second world war, the “new cold war” is not a phrase to use lightly.

Or maybe at all. Russia is not now seeking military domination of Europe. It is not a one-party state. Nor does it claim to be the embodiment of an ideological success story. The once-towering edifice of Marxist-Leninist ideology is as ruined as social credit or syndicalism. An exposition of “sovereign democracy”, as the Kremlin now grandly calls its scheme of things, would barely fill a postcard, let alone a textbook.

To compare all this to the Soviet Union of Leonid Brezhnev’s era may look not only insulting, but absurd. The West’s differences with Russia seem mere nuances when set against the gulf between the modern world and the suicide bomber.

On the other hand, he points out:

…to argue only that the old cold war is dead and gone is to risk missing the point. Whatever we end up calling it, a new period of deep-seated rivalry is approaching—and perhaps has already begun. As in the mid-to-late 1940s, such things take a bit of time to sink in.

Perhaps it really is a queston of what we mean by what we call it. Just as we refer to “neo-Nazism” and “neoconservatism”, or even “neo-paganism”, so the “new Cold War” is just one more of the uncomfortable approximations to which we must acclimatize ourselves in the post-modern geopolitical world.

Is Londonistan turning into Londongrad? Or are they possibly the same thing? Fox News’s Amy Kellogg has the story.

In the Wall Street Journal, Guy Chazan writes about the heroic but curiously variegated aspect of Russia’s leading - and some would say only - independent newspaper. The paper nearly closed in the aftermath of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, who was one of its best-known correspondents, and was the third of the paper’s journalists to lose their lives in recent years. Of the two others, one was bludgeoned to death with a hammer and one died as a result of suspected poisoning. Anna Politkovskaya was shot dead two months ago in the elevator of her apartment block. Now, says Chazan, the paper faces a grim future.

Some excerpts:

From the start, Novaya had a uniquely independent stance. It condemned resident Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of the hard-line Russian parliament in 1993,when all other liberal media backed him. In 1996, an election year, the rest of the Russian press sided with Mr. Yeltsin, but Novaya remained neutral. That earned it respect in journalistic circles, and it was able to poach some of Russia’s top reporters. Circulation rose from 10,000 to 70,000 by the end of 1996 as the paper ran scoop after scoop about graft in the Yeltsin administration.

A series of campaigns also raised its profile and boosted its moral authority. Between 1997 and 1999, its defense correspondent, a Russian army major and decorated Afghan war veteran named Vyacheslav Izmailov, helped free 171 Russian prisoners of war and hostages held by warlords in the rebel region of Chechnya.

However, journalists say that to keep afloat, Novaya Gazeta resorted to a practice endemic in the Russian media — publishing paid-for articles asquerading as news. Mr. Muratov declines to discuss what his paper did but says the entire Russian press engaged in the practice. He insists he “never printed anything that went against the paper’s editorial policy.”

The hodgepodge of styles was often jarring. An issue in November 1998 eatured a hard-hitting account of the murder of Galina Starovoitova, a liberal lawmaker; a feature about the ties between local politics and organized crime in the port of Novorossiisk; and alongside them, an upbeat story about a Moscow bank that funded a memorial in London to Soviet war dead. The head of the bank, billionaire businessman Alexander Lebedev, was one of Novaya’s informal sponsors. Mr. Lebedev denies paying for that particular article but says, “It’s true that I did support them financially, and that their coverage was generally favorable to us.”

Alexei Pankin, a former op-ed editor of the newspaper Izvestia and a friend of Mr. Muratov, says paid articles may have made it possible for Novaya Gazeta journalists to cover the stories that mattered most to them — such as the war in Chechnya — but the practice “no doubt harmed the paper’s reputation.” Novaya Gazeta and other papers were also left vulnerable to allegations of corruption when Mr. Putin began his crackdown on the independent media.

And Novaya’s political coverage was getting it into hot water with the authorities. In the fall of 1999, a series of explosions ripped through apartment blocks in Moscow and two other Russian cities, killing 300 people. The authorities blamed Chechen militants and Mr. Putin sent troops to restore Russian rule in Chechnya. Novaya ran a series of stories describing what it said was evidence the blasts were orchestrated by Russia’s security services. The late Mr. Litvinenko made the same claim — vigorously denied by the Kremlin — after he won political asylum in Britain in 2000.

(hat tips: Robert Amsterdam and chechnya-sl).

Next summer the post of presidency of the state of Israel falls vacant. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle (sub required), Jonathan Freedland is in little doubt as to who he would like to see fill this largely symbolic post:

[Nathan Sharansky’s] election would recognise the arrival of the one million Russians who have come to Israel in the last 15 years or so, granting them the status of fully accepted members of Israeli society. By making the man who embodies the Soviet aliyah the national figurehead, Israel would be saying that the Russians are no longer newcomers, no longer even “the Russians,” but that they are Israelis.

That balm to communal pride might also be wise politics. For otherwise the appetite among Russian-Israelis to see the elevation of one of their own could find its outlet in Avigdor Lieberman, the Moldovan-born authoritarian, bigot and would-be Czar who now, terrifyingly, serves as Israel’s deputy prime minister.

If Russian-Israelis need a role model, let it be Sharansky over Lieberman every time. What’s more, the refusenik formerly known as Anatoly, and his personal struggle as a Soviet prisoner of conscience, makes him, still, a man of international reputation and moral authority.

And heaven knows the presidency of Israel needs that just now. The current incumbent, Moshe Katzav, stands accused on multiple counts of rape and sexual harassment and yet refuses to step down. Every day he clings on as president he demeans an office that is meant to supply a measure of dignity to Israel’s bruising political culture. He should resign now and make way for a man who knows only too well the value of democracy and democratic institutions — because he learned those lessons the hard way.

On Monday this week, Estonia and Finland linked their power grids by means of an undersea cable, thus loosening Russia’s energy grip on the Baltic States, and linking them to the countries of the EU.

Although the Estlink cable was laid mainly to provide the Nordic countries with electricity produced in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, it has been hailed as a key step in ensuring energy security for the Baltic states.

“The new link enhances greatly the energy security of Estonia,” Estonian Minister for Economic Affairs Edgar Savisaar said Monday at the Estonian opening ceremony of in Harku, near the capital Tallinn.

“The existence of Estlink will enable us to manage energy in a better way should our cooperation with the Russian energy system collapse,” Savisaar said.

The Baltic states are still linked to the Russian electricity grid, as they were during Soviet rule, which lasted from the end of World War II until 1991, and also rely heavily on Russia for supplies of natural gas and oil.

At the end of last month, Moscow announced huge hikes in the price of natural gas to the former Soviet republics in the Baltics, and Belarus, underscoring the importance of reducing dependence on Russia for supplies of fuel and electricity.

The process of freeing the Baltics from Moscow’s constantly escalating energy threats is taken a step further today, when Lithuania and Poland are due to sign an agreement committing them to linking their power grids, notes the BBC :

Baltic leaders are hailing the new connections as historically significant, as they reduce their countries’ dependence on Russia.

The three Baltic states, all former members of the Soviet Union, had no connections to the wider European energy grid until this week.

All three countries rely heavily on gas imported from Russia to supply their energy needs, and they feel vulnerable to their large neighbour, especially since the Ukrainian-Russian gas dispute in January.

(hat tip: Leopoldo)

In the FT, Arkady Ostrovsky writes about the continuing deterioration in relations between Britain and Russia:

It was shortly after Anthony Brenton, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, spoke about the challenges to freedom in Russia that a young blond man thrust himself forward and started to yell at the top of his voice: “Brenton, apologise!”

The stunt this week at the Humanities University in Moscow - where Mr Brenton was speaking alongside Sir Tom Stoppard, the British playwright whose trilogy about 19th-century Russian thinkers is being staged in Moscow - was not a one-off prank by an attention-seeking youth. It was part of a well-organised harassment campaign against the ambassador, apparently waged with the knowledge of the Kremlin, that is a striking symptom of the worsening relationship between Moscow and London.

The young man was a member of Nashi (”Our Own”): a Kremlin-sponsored youth movement with a well-earned reputation for thuggery.

The organisation, which claims to have 7,000 active members and another 8,000 sympathisers, has been stalking the UK ambassador seven days a week for the past four months, putting him and his family under considerable strain.

Alexander Lukashenko has been expressing his views on the end of the Soviet Union. Via Telegraf.by [my tr.]:

In an interview for the NTV television channel apropos of the anniversary of the dissolution of the USSR, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko said that the reasons for its collapse were not economic ones. In the President’s view, the main reason for the collapse of the USSR was the “unrestrained nature” of authority, the unlimited wealth which “corrupted everyone inside the country”. The President, however, considers that Belarus has remained a Soviet republic. “Belarus was a very Soviet republic. It remains in essence Soviet even now… Not only because the Soviets have been preserved… A Soviet republic means an international republic, which carries out an appropriate social policy and so on. Belarus was built to live in a United Soviet Union,” the Belarusian President considers.

…the Belorussian President also expressed doubt about the legitimacy of the agreement on the dissolution of the USSR. “Yeltsin was President. He could sign things over there… But our president did not have that right. That document should have been thoroughly analyzed and studied…”

Via Stratfor:

Cuba After Castro

By George Friedman

It is now apparent that Fidel Castro is dying. He is 80 years old, so that should not be surprising. The Cubans are managing his death as if it were a state secret — hiding the self-evident — but that is the nature of the regime, as it is the nature of many governments. The question on the table is whether the Cuban government can survive Castro’s death — and in either case, what course Cuba will follow.

The Communist regime, as we have known it, cannot possibly survive Castro’s death. To be sure, Fidel’s brother Raul will take over leadership; the Cuban Communist Party, the military and intelligence system, and the government ministries will continue to rule. But the regime that Castro created will be dead. It will be dead because Castro will be dead, and whatever survives him cannot be called the same regime. It will have been fundamentally transformed.

Fidel Castro’s departure from the stage, then, leads to two questions. First, what will the future hold for Cuba? And second, will that matter to anyone other than the Cubans?

The Death of a Dream

Under Fidel, the Cuban regime had an end beyond itself. Fidel believed — and, much more significantly, enough of his citizens and international supporters believed — that the purpose of the regime was not only to transform life in Cuba but, more important, to revolutionize Latin America and the rest of the Third World and confront American imperialism with the mobilized masses of the globe. Fidel did not rule for the sake of ruling. He ruled for the sake of revolution.

Raul was a functionary of the Castro regime, as were the others who now will step into the tremendous vacuum that Fidel will leave. For Raul and others of his class, the Cuban regime was an end in itself. Their goal was to keep it functioning. Fidel dreamed of using the regime to reshape the world. His minions, including his brother, may once have had dreams, but for a very long time their focus has been on preserving the regime and their power, come what may.

Therefore, on the day that Fidel Castro dies, the regime he created will die with him and a new regime of functionaries will come into existence. That regime will not be able to claim the imaginations of the disaffected and the politically ambitious around the world. The difference between the old and the new in Cuba is the difference between Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev. It is not a difference in moral character but of imagination. Stalin was far more than a functionary. He was, in his own way, a visionary — and was seen by his followers around the world as a visionary. When the Soviet Union fell into the hands of Brezhnev, it fell into the hands of a functionary. Stalin served a vision; Brezhnev served the regime. Stalin ruled absolutely; Brezhnev ruled by committee and consensus. Stalin was far more than the state and party apparatus; Brezhnev was far less.

Brezhnev’s goal was preserving the Soviet state. There were many reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union, but at the core, the fact that mere survival had become its highest aim was what killed it. The Soviets still repeated lifelessly the Leninist and Stalinist slogans, but no one believed them — and no one thought for one moment that Brezhnev believed them.

It has been many years since Fidel’s vision had any real possibility of coming true. Certainly, it has had little meaning since the fall of the Soviet Union. In some ways, the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia was the end. But regardless of when the practical possibilities of Cuba had dissolved, Fidel Castro continued to believe that the original vision was still possible. More important, his followers believed that he believed, and therefore, they believed. No one can believe in Raul Castro’s vision. Thus, the era that began in 1959 is ending.

The ascent of Raul raises the question of what hope there is for Cuba.

Fidel promised tremendous economic improvements, along with Cuba’s place in the vanguard of the revolution. The vanguard now has disintegrated, and the economic improvements never came in the ways promised. When Fidel took power, he argued that it was economic relations with the imperialists that impoverished Cuba. By the end of his rule, he had come to argue that it was the lack of economic relations with the imperialists that impoverished Cuba — that the American embargo had strangled the country. That was absurd: Cuba could trade with Canada, the rest of Latin America, Europe, Asia and wherever it wanted. It was not locked out of the world. It wasn’t even locked out of the United States, since third parties would facilitate trade. But then, Fidel was always persuasive, even when completely incoherent. That was the foundation of his strength: He believed deeply in what he said, and those who listened believed as well. Fidel was writing poems, not economic analysis, and that kept anyone from looking too closely at the details.

Now, the poetry is ending, and the detail men and bean-counters are in charge. They don’t know any poems — and while they can charge the United States with bearing the blame for all of the revolution’s failures, it is not the same as if Fidel were doing it. Regimes do not survive by simple brute strength. There have to be those who believe. Stalin had his believers, as did Hitler and Saddam Hussein. But who believes in Raul and his committees? Certainly, the instruments of power are in their hands, as they were in the hands of other communist rulers whose regimes collapsed. But holding the instruments of power is not, over time, enough. It is difficult to imagine the regime of functionaries surviving very long. Without Fidel, there is little to hope for.

A Question of Control

The future of Cuba once meant a great deal to the international system. Once, there was nearly a global thermonuclear war over Cuba. But that was more than 40 years ago, and the world has changed. The question now is whether the future of Cuba matters to anyone but the Cubans.

Geopolitically, the most important point about Cuba is that it is an island situated 90 miles from the coast of the United States — now the world’s only superpower. Cuba was a Spanish colony until the Spanish-American war, and then was either occupied or dominated by the United States and American interests until the rise of Castro. Its history, therefore, is defined first by its relationship with Spain and then by its relationship to the United States.

From the U.S. standpoint, Cuba is always a geographical threat. If the Mississippi River is the great highway of American agriculture and New Orleans its great port to the world, then Cuba sits directly athwart New Orleans’ access to the world. There is no way for ships from New Orleans to exit the Gulf of Mexico into the Atlantic Ocean but to traverse two narrow channels on either side of Cuba — the Yucatan channel, between Cuba’s western coast and the Yucatan; or the Straits of Florida, between the island’s northern coast and Florida. If these two channels were closed, U.S. agricultural and mineral exports and imports would crumble. Not only New Orleans, but all of the Gulf Coast ports like Houston, would be shut in.

Cuba does not have the size or strength in and of itself to close those channels. But should another superpower control Cuba, the threat would become real and intolerable. The occupation of Cuba by a foreign power — whether Spain, Germany, Russia or others — would pose a direct geopolitical threat to the United States. Add to that the possibility that missiles could be fired from Cuba to the United States, and we can see what Washington sees there. It is not Cuba that is a threat, but rather a Cuba that is allied with or dominated by a foreign power challenging the United States globally. Therefore, the Americans don’t much care who runs Cuba, so long as Cuba is not in a politico-military alliance with another power.

Under Spain, there was a minor threat. But prior to World War II, German influence in Cuba was a real concern. And Castro’s Communist revolution and alliance with the Soviet Union were seen by the United States as a mortal threat. It was not Cuban ideology (though that was an irritant) nearly so much as Cuba’s geopolitical position and the way it could be exploited by other great powers that obsessed the United States. When the Soviet Union went away, so did the American obsession. Now, Washington’s Cuba policy is merely a vestige from a past era.

Without a foreign sponsor, Cuba is geopolitically impotent. It cannot threaten U.S. sea-lanes. It cannot be a base for nuclear weapons to be used against the United States. Its regime cannot be legitimized by the fact that the international system is focused on it. That means that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cubans, under Castro, have been trying to make themselves useful to major powers. Havana approached the Chinese, and they didn’t bite. The Russians may be interested in the future, but they have their hands full in their own neighborhood right now. Countries like North Korea and Iran are in no position to exploit the opportunity.

The Cubans have had to content themselves with playing midwife to the leftist movements in Venezuela and Bolivia. The Latin American left in general continues to take its inspiration from Fidel’s Cuba. Now, this does not create a new geopolitical reality, but it does create the possibility of one, which is what Fidel has been working on. If Fidel dies, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia are not going to turn to Raul for inspiration and legitimacy. Rather, Raul is going to be looking to Venezuela for cheap oil, while Chavez claims the place of Fidel as the leader of the Latin American left.

So, if Cuba is no longer to be the center of the Latin American revolutionary left, then what is it? It will become an island of occasional strategic importance — though not important at the moment — with a regime of functionaries as inspiring as a Bulgarian Party Congress in 1985. Cuba with Fidel was the hope of the Latin American left. Cuba without Fidel is tedious method, a state with a glorious past and a dubious future.

Past as Prologue

Certainly, Raul and his colleagues have superb instruments with which to stabilize Cuban security, but these are no better than the instruments that Romania and East Germany had. Those instruments will work for a while, but not permanently. For the regime to survive, Cuba must transform its economic life, but to do that, it risks the survival of the regime — for the regime’s control of the economy is one of the instruments of stability. Raul is not a man who is about to redefine the country, but he must try.

We are, therefore, pessimistic about the regime’s ability to survive. Or more precisely, we do not believe that the successor regime — communism without Fidel — can hold on for very long. Raul Castro now is reaching out to the United States, but contrary to the Cuban mythology, the United States cannot solve Cuba’s problems by ending the trade embargo. The embargo is a political gesture, not a functioning reality. End it or keep it, the Cuban problem is Cuba — and without Fidel, the Cubans will have to face that fact.

Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com.

Distribution and Reprints

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Via Prague Watchdog (my tr.):

Unscrupulous bosses robbing construction workers in Grozny

By Umalt Chadayev

GROZNY, Chechnya (December 7 2006) - Local residents involved in restoration work in the Chechen capital are complaining that payment of earnings for work they have done is being delayed, and that often the amount of the pay is much lower than promised.

Large-scale restoration work on buildings is at present continuing in Grozny. In the city’s central section alone, 87 municipal houses are being restored. Thousands of people have been brought in to do the repair of the buildings, and some even arrive from remote districts of the republic in the hope of earning just a little extra money.

But the vast majority of these people, who perform the heavy work of clearing obstructions and collecting rubbish from multi-storey buildings, and then repairing them, become the victims of swindlers among the foremen, site managers and other bosses. Many are not paid the money due to them, sometimes for weeks, and often for months, and frequently the amounts of the payments are much lower than those that there promised when they were hired for the job.

“Two months ago I was hired at a construction site in one of Grozny’s micro-districts [mikrorayony]. The team-leader promised us we would earn not less than 12,000-13,000 a month, that after the repairs on that building were completed (it was a multi-storey apartment block) we would get another building to repair, and so on,” says Sakhib Murdalov, a resident of the village of Gikalo in Grozny district. “For a week we worked like slaves, removing the obstructions in this half-wrecked house, dragging the rubbish outside, cleaning the stairs and so on.”.

“However, when the heaviest part of the work was done, and we were supposed to start plastering walls and carrying out minor repairs in the apartments, the leader suddenly told us that our work team (there were six of us in it) was being disbanded for an indeterminate period. We were told that the work was being suspended, and that we would be informed when it was going to be resumed again,” he says.

“They promised us we’d be paid in the course of the week for the work we’d already done. I went to collect it, and it was only about three thousand rubles, for more than a month’s work! First they said the documents were being prepared, then they told us the estimates had not yet been received, then they said that the money hadn’t arrived yet… I realized that we were just being ‘fleeced’. They had made us do the dirtiest and hardest part of the work, and then got their close relatives and friends together and gave the site to them. For the plastering, painting, whitewashing and so forth. Such things happen here quite a lot,” Murdalov says.

In the opinion of 48-year-old Ilyas, a former law enforcement official, unscrupulous businessmen use these methods in order to make large sums of capital. “Imagine that you have, say, 50 men working on your site. Each man is promised a minimum payment of 10,000 rubles. That adds up to half a million. If the payments are delayed for a couple of months while the money is invested somewhere, it’s possible to make a very good profit. Which is what all these team-leaders, foremen, site managers and so on are doing,” he said.

“The whole trouble is that the people who are being swindled simply don’t have anywhere else to turn,” Ilyas thinks. “The republic has an enormous surplus of labour. The shortage of jobs is just huge. As far as I know, something like 80 per cent of the labour force don’t have any work. So people grasp at any chance to get themselves hired somewhere. They’re prepared to wait weeks and months before getting their wages, and the swindlers take advantage of this. Those who don’t co-operate or are too insistent can be sacked without any problem. It’s not permanent work, after all, it’s temporary, and no one usually signs any agreements or documents relating to the hiring as a rule,” says Ilyas.

On several occasions construction workers who have been cheated have held pickets and protest rallies in Grozny, demanding payment of the money that is owed to them. Yet the ongoing problem has so far not been resolved. Swindlers continue to rob people, avoiding all responsibility for their actions.

Translated by David McDuff.

There is more on Russia’s use of 4 Israeli prisoners as bargaining chips in this MosNews feature. Excerpt:

The NEWSru Israel website asked Leonid Nevzlin who currently lives in Israel to comment on Yedioth Ahronoth’s report. “I have heard that those convicts were warned that if Israel refused to extradite Nevzlin they could abandon hope for early release or transfer to an Israeli prison. I also know that my extradition has many times been discussed at meetings between top Israeli and Russian foreign ministry officials but all those conversations were off the record,” the entrepreneur said.

Nevzlin also pointed out to an inaccuracy in Yedioth Ahronoth’s report. “In truth, there is no permanent extradition pact between Russia and Israel saying that criminals shall serve their sentences at home. Such an accord was achieved once, on the Zhuravlyov case (Multiple murder suspect Andrei Zhuravlyov, aka Terrazini, was extradited to Russia in 2002, after the court said he had obtained Israeli citizenship unlawfully). As to the jewelers’ case a separate agreement was drawn up,” Nevzlin said.

Nevzlin said he had no reason to doubt the facts unearthed by Yedioth Ahronoth. “I view [Russia’s actions] as a hostage-taking in spite of the fact that those people had been arrested before I moved to Israel. In fact, what we deal with here is blackmail where innocent Israelis are being used as bargaining chips,” Nevzlin said.

Aftenposten’s English-language edition has an examination of some strange links in the Litvinenko smear which surfaced in the Observer newspaper at the weekend.

Aftenposten has seen an email from a British human rights activist and Professor of Russian, and member of Litvinenko’s network, who claims to have information that Svetlichnaya was acting on instructions from “a special bureau” - a reference to the secret service FSB - to study in London in order to have easier access to exiled Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev.

——-

The British professor of Russian, who insisted on remaining nameless on this matter, accuses Svetlichnaya of being part of a “massive disinformation campaign” about the Litvinenko affair.

Human rights activist Maria Fuglevaag Warsinski called the accusations of secrecy and blackmail into question, citing Litvinenko’s efforts to publicize information he gained.

“He wanted to spread this information to as many as possible and was pleased by the help he got to disseminate this to human rights activists and advocates of democracy,” Warsinski said.

Update: Much more on this story here.

As Russia demands the handover of Berezovsky and Zakayev in exchange for co-operation in the Litvinenko poison case, the Israeli press has been revealing that similar tactics are being used by Moscow in the case of Leonid Nevzlin, who is wanted by the Russian authorities in connection with the Yukos affair.

On December 5, the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot published an article by the journalist Itamar Eichner under the headline “Putin’s Israeli Hostages”, newsru.co.il reports.

The article says that the Russian authorities are refusing to allow four Israelis who were sentenced in Russia to serve their terms of imprisonment in Israel until Yukos executive Leonid Nevzlin is extradited to Russia.

The four Israelis - Shimon Hirschhorn, Eli Katz, Shalom Kasierer (a scion of one of the world’s leading diamond families) and Vladislav Kagan, are serving 6-year sentences in Moscow on charges of smuggling uncut diamonds.

Eichner says that the men are essentially being used by Moscow as hostages, in spite of the prisoner exchange agreement that exists between the two countries. Moreover, the article of the offence for which they were originally sentenced has since been struck from the Russian federal criminal code. Hints of a possible “exchange” have been contained in discussions with representatives of the Israeli authorities and in conversations with the prisoners’ relatives.

According to Eichner, one of the Israeli prisoners recently managed to pass a note to one of his relatives which said that in October 2005 the four received a visit from an unknown person who told them that they had been entrusted with “the task of bringing Nevzlin to Russia”. If they co-operated in this, they would be set free and returned to Israel, but if they did not, they would have to serve the rest of their sentences in Russia. Another unknown person contacted a relative of one of the prisoners, asking to meet him in a Tel Aviv cafe, again mentioning Nevzlin.

A high-ranking Israeli source has confirmed that Russia is using the four prisoners in order to exert pressure in the Nevzlin extradition case. Although the Russian government does not dare to make an official statement, the hints are passed by state channels.

The newsru.co.il article also mentions another Israeli citizen, Mikhail Mirilashvili, who is currently serving an 8-year term of hard labour in a prison camp near Volgograd, Russia, for “creating an organized criminal group with the aim of freeing his abducted father”. Mirilashvili was vice-president of the Russian Jewish Congress. His name has also been mentioned repeatedly in the Russian press in connection with Nevzlin.

(hat tip: M.L.)

Mikhail Trepashkin is the only one of the people in Russia who investigated the 1999 apartment block explosions who remains alive today. All the others - the last of which was Alexander Litvinenko - have been murdered.

The British detectives who have gone to Moscow to investigate Litvinenko’s murder have been told by the Russian authorities that under no circumstances will they be permitted to interview Mr. Trepashkin, whom Moscow accuses of having betrayed state secrets.

Mikhail Trepashkin, who was arrested in 2006, is being held in a prison some 140 kilometres north of Yekaterinburg (formerly known as Sverdlovsk) on the eastern side of the Ural mountains. Although he is ill, he has been systematically tortured and exposed to extreme cold. He may soon die, and his testimony on the globally threatening events now taking place within the Russian special services, both inside Russia and in the world at large, may well be lost.

It’s possible to read about the Trepashkin case at this website.

See also in this blog: Release Mikhail Trepashkin

At chechnya-sl, Norbert Strade has translated from German an interview with Akhmed Zakayev:

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung

The Litvinenko case

“They’ll kill everyone whom they consider their enemy”

3 December, 2006

FAZ: Who killed Alexander Litvinenko?

AZ: That’s of course a question for the police, but I have no doubts that his former colleagues from the special services were involved, including his former colleague and boss Vladimir Putin. I don’t think much of the theory that it allegedly was done by a group inside the secret services, which intended to harm Putin. An operation on this scale isn’t carried out without the approval of the first person in the state.

FAZ: What would be Putin’s motive?

AZ: A former teacher once described Putin as small-minded, malevolent and unforgiving. I believe that Putin personally hated Litvinenko and couldn’t forgive that he had changed sides. In the world-view of these people, he had betrayed the homeland and the system. Livinenko was the first person of such high rank in 400 years of Russian-Chechen history, who publicly dealt with Russian war crimes in Chechnya. And not only that - he was collecting precise informations, names, data of operations. He was enemy no. 1 of the regime, a regime which consists for a third part of people from the secret services..

FAZ: But could he still be dangerous to Putin?

AZ: He had an enormous amount of information about the work of the KGB, the FSB - his own experience, facts, connections; he knew who is behind whom, who works for whom. He was the first person in Russia since Solzhenitsyn who experienced that one of his books was forbidden. That was his book about the background of the bomb attacks in 1999 on apartment houses in Russia, of which the Chechens were blamed.

FAZ: Why polonium-210 was used as a murder weapon?

AZ: They were convinced that the cause of death won’t be found, since there is no precedence for a murder by polonium anywhere in the world. Remember that Putin, at the summit in Finland, still declared that there was no evidence for a violent crime, so there was no reason for an investigation. After all, it took three weeks until it was discovered. The murderers didn’t expect that Sasha would survive for so long. In earlier trials with Chechens, who weren’t as extremely fit as he, the victims didn’t survive for more than 10 days.

FAZ: You are saying that previously to this, Chechens were already poisoned with polonium?

AZ: Yes, e.g. Commander Lecha Ismailov. He died in 2004 in Lefortovo prison in Moscow, with the same symptoms - loss of hair, internal bleeding, after he had been drinking tea with two FSB officers.

FAZ: Do you see a connection between the murder and the two laws passed by the Duma in July, about the “liquidation” of people opposing the regime?

AZ: Of course. And because of this, the Europeans shouldn’t pretend that this murder wasn’t to be expected. The Duma passed two laws in July, on the eve of the G8 summit in St. Petersburg. The first one allows the government to liquidate “extremists” and “terrorist” abroad. The second one defines people opposing the government and regime critics as extremists.

FAZ: Litvinenko used to be a special agent, who was himself responsible of murdering people, too. Then he turned into an opponent of the regime. What kind of person was he?

AZ: In the middle of the 90-s, Alla Dudayeva, the widow of the first Chechen president, once told me that she was arrested and interrogated by a young officer, who didn’t fit into these structures at all. That was Sasha Litvinenko. I, too, have asked myself how someone like him could ever work in this system. Maybe some kind of rupture happened in his life. I learned to know him as a good, honest person. It is said that children are a barometer for a person’s soul. My grandchildren loved Litvinenko, that’s for sure.

FAZ: You saw Litvinenko on the day he was poisoned. Have you been checked for polonium radiation yourself?

AZ: Yes, but the result was negative. But there will be more checks, after traces were found in my car. And of course I visited Sasha in the hospital several times a day.

FAZ: Do you fear for your life?

AZ: I’m not afraid, because I have known since 1994 that I must be ready to face the worst any time. It isn’t so that I’m a hero or that I don’t want to live, but I know that fear is no guarantee for your safety. And I really wish to warn the Europeans not to think that these people will only kill regime critics and Chechens. That’s an illusion - they’ll kill everyone they consider an enemy. The Europeans should be afraid as well.

Questions by Christiane Hoffmann

Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, 03.12.2006, Nr. 48 / page 11

Via The Times (UK):

Despite the comments of Yuri Chaika, the Prosecutor-General, intelligence services in Britain are convinced that the poisoning of Litvinenko was authorised by the Russian Federal Security Service.

Security sources have told The Times that the FSB orchestrated a “highly sophisticated plot” and was likely to have used some of its former agents to carry out the operation on the streets of London.

“We know how the FSB operates abroad and, based on the circumstances behind the death of Mr Litvinenko, the FSB has to be the prime suspect,” a source said yesterday.

Intelligence officials say that only officials such as FSB agents would have been able to obtain sufficient amounts of polonium-210, the radioactive substance used to fatally poison Mr Litvinenko only weeks after he was given British citizenship.

As the Kremlin refuses British police access to Mikhail Trepashkin as a witness in the Litvinenko poisoning case (and also rules out the extradition of suspects), and Andrei Lugovoi checks into hospital again, RFE/RL’s Newsline has some background items on the developing diplomatic crisis between London and Moscow:

BRITAIN DETERMINED TO PURSUE EVIDENCE IN LITVINENKO’S DEATH ‘WHEREVER IT GOES’
Four London Metropolitan Police investigators began work in Moscow on December 5 and plan to speak to possible witnesses in connection with the unexplained death in London on November 23 of British citizen and former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officer Aleksandr Litvinenko, news.ru reported (see “RFE/RL Newsline,” November 27, and December 1 and 4, 2006). The investigators’ interest reportedly centers on former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi, who met several times with Litvinenko before his death. British inspectors also want to interview several other people, including former FSB officer Mikhail Trepashkin, who began serving a four-year prison term in Nizhny Tagil in 2004 for allegedly divulging state secrets. But a spokesman for the Federal Corrections Service said in Moscow on December 5 that his department “will not allow a person convicted for divulging state secrets to remain a source of information for representatives of foreign special services,” Interfax reported. Russian officials previously pledged full cooperation with the British investigation. A lawyer for Trepashkin told reporters recently that her client has “information that may shed light on the murder [of Litvinenko], and he is ready to speak out.” PM

RUSSIA WARNS OF ‘HARM’ TO RELATIONS
In Brussels, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on December 4 that he has warned his British counterpart, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, against anyone “politicizing” the Litvinenko case, Britain’s “The Times” reported on December 5. Lavrov also said that “it is unacceptable that a campaign should be whipped up with the participation of [unnamed British] officials. This is…harming our relations.” He added that he told Beckett of “the necessity to avoid any kind of politicization of this matter.” But also in Brussels, U.K. Home Secretary John Reid stressed that British police “will follow the evidence wherever it goes.” “The Times” reported on December 5 that unspecified “intelligence services in Britain are convinced that the poisoning of…Litvinenko was authorized by the [FSB]. Security sources have told ‘The Times’ that the FSB orchestrated a ‘highly sophisticated plot’ and was likely to have used some of its former agents to carry out the operation on the streets of London.” The paper added that an unnamed “source” told its reporters that “‘we know how the FSB operates abroad and, based on the circumstances behind the death of…Litvinenko, the FSB has to be the prime suspect’ in his death.” The daily argued that “the involvement of a former FSB officer made it easier to lure…Litvinenko to meetings at various locations and to distance its bosses in the Kremlin from being directly implicated in the plot. Intelligence officials say that only officials such as FSB agents would have been able to obtain sufficient amounts of polonium-210, the radioactive substance used to fatally poison…Litvinenko.” But unnamed officials of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom) denied on December 4 that any polonium could have left Russia unaccounted for, Russian news agencies reported. The officials added that Rosatom exports polonium to the United States and United Kingdom but has no control over what happens to the substance when it arrives there. PM

FATHER SAYS LITVINENKO CONVERTED TO ISLAM
Valter Litvinenko, the father of the late Aleksandr Litvinenko, told RFE/RL’s Russian Service in London on December 4 that his son converted to Islam shortly before his death. Valter Litvinenko added that “Sasha had been thinking about becoming a Muslim for some time because he was fairly critical of what had been happening in the hierarchy of our [Russian Orthodox] Church. Deciding to become a Muslim is, of course, a fairly unordinary decision and a crucial one.” The father said that his son told him two days before his death that he had “become a Muslim.” The father replied that “it’s your decision. As long as you don’t become a communist or a Satanist.” London-based Chechen Republic Ichkeria Foreign Minister Akhmed Zakayev told RFE/RL’s Russian Service on December 4 that Aleksandr Litvinenko told him of his desire to embrace Islam. Zakayev added that “I told him it was a purely personal question, that it isn’t important to which god we pray as long as we aren’t doing ignoble acts. And I sort of dropped it.” But Zakayev noted that Litvinenko repeatedly “returned to the subject. He pronounced the shahadah [the fundamental Muslim statement of faith], and any student of Islam will tell you that there are no particular rituals for converting to Islam. All you have to do is say one sura [a verse or chapter from the Koran] and, from that moment, if the person who pronounces this sura, this shahadah, has sincere intentions, from that moment he is considered a Muslim.” Zakayev said that on November 22, at Litvinenko’s request, Zakayev “brought an imam to him. The imam read over him a sura from the Koran, the one that is read over a dying Muslim.” On December 4, the Russian daily “Izvestia” returned to the theory that “Litvinenko was either involved in selling radioactive materials, or somebody was trying to build a portable nuclear device. It’s hard to find any other explanation for the presence of that much polonium in proximity” to him. The daily suggested that the polonium with which Litvinenko had come into contact would have been worth $40 million, which would have made it “the most expensive poisoning in history” had it indeed been a poisoning. On December 5, Britain’s “Financial Times” suggested that “prolonged exposure to Russian conspiracy theories can be damaging to mental health.” PM

The Telegraph writes about the letter sent by the Kremlin to Britain’s foreign secretary “protesting” about the British government’s “failure” to prevent the publication of the contents of Alexander Litvinenko’s deathbed statement, in which he blamed Putin for his murder.

The implication of the Russian protest, that Britain could have gagged Mr Litvinenko, caused fury yesterday.

Dr Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, told The Daily Telegraph: “In Britain, people are still free to speak, which is a lesson that seemingly needs to be learnt in Mr Putin’s Russia.

“At first glance, it [the Russian protest] is an outrage. But on a deeper aspect, it is symptomatic of a state that does not understand any longer the concept of free speech.”

Dame Pauline Neville-Jones, the former head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, joined the criticism, calling the Kremlin letter “absolute bloody cheek, frankly”.

She added: “The other thing I would say is that this is the playing out of Russian politics on our soil and it’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Just a reminder that the book Blowing Up Russia by Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky can be downloaded free of charge here [no more, alas, though excerpts are available here].

Jeremy Putley reports that

Two copies of Blowing Up Russia: Terror from Within are currently available on the British online book store Amazon for £189 for a new version and nearly £237 for a second-hand edition.

The book’s publisher SPI Books, a small U.S. outfit that specializes in works on politics, terrorism and military affairs, is offering it on its Internet site at $13.95 dollars plus postage.

Also, Kalle Kniivilä points out that the Russian version of the book is available for free download here.

Paolo Guzzanti has published the Italian text of an interview he recently conducted with his friend Mario Scaramella, who is currently under observation in a London hospital after being poisoned by polonium-210.

In the interview, Scaramella says the dose of polonium which was administered to him was six times the amount considered necessary in order to be fatal. He states that although he feels well, has no symptoms at present, and his life is not immediately at risk, the doctors have told him it will be at least 5 months before it is known precisely what future course his condition will take, and that even if he survives those 5 months, he will have to consider himself a cancer patient all his life, will have to submit to chemotherapy and avoid exposing himself to sunlight.

Of his recent revelations concerning figures in political life in Italy and Russia, Scaramella says (my translation):

“I can say that all my interviews with Litvinenko, whether related to the work of the Mitrokhin commission or quite extraneous to it took place in front of a television camera and in the presence of myself and Maxim, Alex’s brother, who did the interpreting. In these interviews, Alexander spoke Russian on a freewheeling basis and for many hours.

And why are these interviews coming out precisely now?

“For a very obvious reason: I believe that the United Kingdom investigators bust be able to have every useful element at their disposal in order to find our assassins. It’s clear that if Litvinenko was poisoned, and if I was posioned, that means something: you don’t need a Nobel prize to understand that someone has tried to close our mouths, and that would make a motive, don’t you think?”

Today a rumour has begun to circulate in the press that Litvinenko was probably a vulgar blackmailer. Comments?

“It’s obvious: the prospect of the publication of possible revelations immediately releases a campaign to destroy his credibility: if the man who up till yesterday was a victim and a martyr starts to talk, even when dead, he must at least have been a blackmailer.”

What else do you wish for?

“To have the time to nail down by the use of the truth alone all those who are killing us, whether physically or in terms of our image.”

Via AP:

Britain’s senior law enforcement official said Sunday an inquiry into the death of a former KGB agent had expanded overseas, and a U.S.-based friend of the former agent said he told police the name of the person he believes orchestrated the poisoning.

Yuri Shvets said had known the poisoned ex-spy, Alexander Litvinenko, since 2002 and spoke with him on Nov. 23, the day Litvinenko died following his exposure to a rare radioactive element, polonium-210.

“The truth is, we have an act of international terrorism on our hands. I happen to believe I know who is behind the death of my friend Sasha and the reason for his murder,” Shvets said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press by telephone from the United States, referring to Litvinenko by his Russian nickname.

In the Miami Herald, veteran Cuban-American journalist Bonnie M. Anderson, whose father was tortured and executed by the Cuban Communist regime, considers the week of celebrations of Fidel Castro's birthday, together with the U.S. media response to it, and wonders why Americans seem to have so little compassion for the pain that Cuban exiles have experienced:

Americans show compassion for cancer survivors, for DUI and rape victims, for people suffering from depression, physical and mental abuse. We show compassion for famine victims in Africa; as an NBC news correspondent, I broke stories about genocide in Ethiopia, and the world -- but especially the United States -- responded with millions of dollars of money, but most important, with compassion.

------

The day that Castro's illness was first reported, I woke up very early and was watching CBS. On their early morning shows, they repeatedly said that ''Castro is considered a ruthless dictator by some in Miami.'' I fired off an e-mail to CBS President Sean McManus. What I wrote, in short, was this: If a man who murdered 20,000 people, imprisoned for decades hundreds of thousands of others, caused countless hundreds of thousands to flee the country (many losing their lives in desperate attempts to reach freedom on flimsy rafts) and has repressed a nation for nearly five decades -- denying them the most basic of human rights -- is not considered a ruthless dictator by all, who the hell is?

I haven't heard back from him. I don't expect I will. In fact, I suspect he, and other network executives, will continue to cozy up to the Cuban government (whoever leads it) in order to make sure that when Castro dies, their networks have access to the coverage. That's the way it is in the corporate news world.

Read it all.

(via Babalu Blog)

At the NATO summit in Riga last week, Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, gave a keynote speech in which he called for NATO’s basic role to be updated: it should now, he said, include protection of allied countries’ energy security.

In EDM, Vladimir Socor examines the senator’s proposals:

The NATO Charter’s Article 5 (treating an armed attack on an allied country as an attack against all) is designed to prevent coercion of a member country by a non-member country. That interpretation must apply also to a cutoff of energy supplies and trigger allied measures to supply the threatened country with energy, Lugar urged. For, ultimately, a cutoff in energy supplies is no different from the threat of military attack or a military demonstration against a member country, in that the goal is to force that country to submit to foreign coercion.

Thus, Lugar urged NATO to identify alternatives to existing pipeline routes, with the necessary financial and political support; develop strategies that include the re-supply of a country that is victim of an aggressive energy suspension; establish mechanisms to shift energy supplies and services to a member country under such attack; and ensure that infrastructure is in place to respond to such an attack. A coordinated and well-publicized Alliance response would become a deterrent that could reduce the chances of miscalculation or military conflict. It would also provide a powerful incentive for member countries to remain in the alliance and for prospective members to accelerate reforms necessary to qualify for membership.

While making clear that Russian policies are the main source of such concern, Lugar also advocated establishing regular high-level consultations between Russia and NATO on energy security to deal with Russia’s rising challenge. “Its recent actions to temporarily reduce gas supplies to the West, confiscate some foreign energy investments, and create further barriers to new investments are undermining confidence in Moscow’s reliability.” Consequently, NATO should focus on how it would supply beleaguered member countries with the energy resources needed to withstand geo-strategic blackmail.

Lugar’s initiative reflects the frustration widely felt among European Union and NATO member countries with the EU’s failure to formulate a common energy policy and supply diversification strategy. Given the two organizations’ overlapping membership, NATO could legitimately become a forum for deliberation and decisions on supply assistance to member countries targeted for aggression with the new weapons of energy. Failure by the EU or NATO to devise joint responses to these emergent threats would risk turning the alliance into a hollow shell.

Via the Telegraph:

The Russian intelligence services, the prime suspects behind the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, have a network of more than 30 spies operating in Britain, it can be revealed.

Mario Scaramella’s name was one of five on a supposed “hit-list” of people allegedly targeted for assassination by a shadowy group called Dignity and Honour, run by a Colonel Valentin Velichko.

The sophisticated ring represents the greatest espionage threat facing Britain, Whitehall sources told The Sunday Telegraph.

The agents, equivalent to one in five of the Moscow government officials based in Britain, are known to be monitoring the movements and activities of Russian emigres and opponents of the Putin regime.

But they are also involved in a widespread operation targeting businessmen, MPs and scientists in an attempt to steal commercial and state secrets. Only the United States, it is understood, has more Russian agents operating on its soil.

Whitehall sources claim that the agents are as active today as they were at the height of the Cold War, despite the fact that the Kremlin is now one of Britain’s major allies in the war on terrorism.

As the implications of Alexander Litvinenko’s poisoning - and now the poisoning of his associate, Mario Scaramella - become increasingly clear, revealing Moscow’s aim of intimidating its critics and silencing those who would support them, additional signs of the Kremlin’s real policies with regard to its neighbours, and the rest of the world, are also becoming more obvious.

Responding to Estonia’s banning of the public display of Nazi and Soviet emblems, and of emblems that derive from them, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov gives the lie to assumptions that today’s Russia has in any sense apologized for the crimes of its Soviet past. Indeed, in his remarks, Lavrov appears fully to endorse not only the Soviet occupation of Estonia, but also the Soviet state itself, together with its negation of democracy, human liberty and the rule of law.

As the RIAN report points out,

The use of Soviet and Nazi symbols will be punished with fines or imprisonment of up to three years, depending on the circumstances.

Lavrov’s response:

“I consider the Estonian government’s latest decision morally disgraceful, and it can engender fabricated political problems now that real problems, including those of the Russian-speaking population, should be resolved there,” Sergei Lavrov said.

————-

Meanwhile, Der Spiegel carries a disturbing report on the funeral of the ex-Stasi chief Markus Wolf, a one-time colleague of Vladimir Putin, who was in charge of the brutal repression of dissent within communist East Germany.

Speaking at the funeral, the Russian ambassador, Vladimir Kotenev, praised Wolf in glowing terms as “one Germany’s best sons”, and as “one of Russia’s best friends in Germany”.

CDU foreign affairs spokesman Willy Wimmer characterized Kotenev’s remarks as “an unbelievable event”, and wrote a letter of protest to Germany’s foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. In Wimmer’s view, Kotenev has revealed Russia’s true attitude towards democratic Germany.

(via ML)

Earlier this week, as President Bush arrived in neighbouring Estonia on an unprecedented full official visit, an article in Finland’s Helsingin Sanomat considered Finland-U.S. relations, noting:

The most powerful man in the world is so close, but then again, so hopelessly far. Bush is not especially popular around the world, but Finland’s leadership would have welcomed him with open arms.

Such a visit would have corrected an awkward blemish in relations between Finland and the United States: George W. Bush and Tarja Halonen have met too infrequently.

Halonen and Bush will both soon have been in office at the same time for six years, but they have had only one meeting, at which time less than an hour was reserved for their discussions. Bush received Halonen in the White House on April 16th, 2002. It will soon be five years since that meeting.

Fortunately Halonen and Bush have managed to exchange a few words at meetings. Who can forget the charming photo of Halonen straightening Bush’s tie at a meeting of the Euro-Atlantic Council in Istanbul in the summer of 2004.

Bush has never visited Finland. Ten years will soon have passed from the most recent visit of a US president to Finland. Bill Clinton came to Helsinki in March 1997, and after that no US presidents or vice presidents have been here.

The article concluded:

It is clear that Halonen’s programme of visits to the United States and Russia is not in balance. There is no reason to worry about this. Russia is a more important country for Finland than the United States - even though the United States is the most powerful country in the world.

However, the matter can also be seen from a different angle. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union it appeared for a moment that the Kremlin did not care about Finland. Putin has shown that Finland is again an important country for Russia.

At the end of the Cold War and a few years after it, it also appeared that Finland would have been a valuable partner for the United States. The Bush Presidency has shown that this is no longer the case. 

Meanwhile, Edward Lucas has a report on how this week’s NATO Summit in Riga was nearly gatecrashed by Vladimir Putin.