Russia

A commonplace among Russia-watchers in the West is to see Putin's eight-year presidency as a retreat into autocracy after Yeltsin's chaotic experiment with freedom in the 1990s. Some hardliners even depict Putin, with his siloviki cronies (i.e. former or still serving members of the security services) as heir to the late Yuri Andropov, a KGB spymaster who went on to become Soviet leader.

Edward Lucas made the interesting point on BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week this morning, that almost unnoticed amid the weekend’s press coverage of Russia’s disputes with the British Council and Royal Academy, President Putin went to Bulgaria to sign a gas pipeline deal that closes a circle as elegantly, in its way, as Matisse’s La Danse.

Just been reading Andrew Nagorski's The Greatest Battle, which covers much the same ground as Rodric Braithwaite's Moscow 1941, published two years ago, though Nagorski's double focus on Stalin and Hitler brings out the odd symmetry of a grand climacteric.

While British liberals fret about the dismal state of democracy in Russia, and letterwriters take up their pens to protest the fate of many a new “dissident”, most Russians are more interested in their newfound freedom to renovate and redesign their flats or take foreign holidays than any liberty the ballot box can deliver.

Say what you like about Vladimir Putin but he's full of surprises. At the end of a week in which newspaper pundits in the West have been wringing their hands about the enfeebled state of Russian democracy, and the Washington watchdog Freedom House has again derided Russia as "not free"', Putin goes on the offensive with plans for a think-tank of his own to criticise US and European democracy.

The start of the New Year finds Russia in bad shape, according to US democracy watchdog Freedom House,which claims that Russians now enjoy the same level of freedom ascitizens of Angola, Egypt and Tajikistan. In fact, Freedom House hasbeen scoring Russia "Not Free" for several years now. Yet even by itsown questionable standards, things apparently went "from bad to worse"in 2007, largely because of abuses during the State Duma election campaign:

The British Council saga took another surprising twist with the news overnight that Russian traffic cops had arrested the son of former Labour Party leader NeilKinnock on a phoney drink-driving charge. Stephen Kinnock runs the Council's office in St Petersburg, which re-opened this week in defiance of an Russian ban on its activities there and in the west Siberian city of Yekaterinburg. The timing of Kinnock's arrest was anything but coincidental. The day before he was quoted in the Russian press describing the case against the British Council as "purely political".

It seemsI’m not the only one who thinks the Kremlin may have fallen into its own trap.Nobody can deny that United Russia won an historic victory in Sunday’sparliamentary elections, with 64.1% of the vote, more than 50 points ahead ofthe runners-up, the Communists. But, according to Mikhail Rostovsky in MoskovskyKomsomolets, thereferendum on the Putin Plan failed.

No surprises, then, about the outcome of yesterday's parliamentary elections in Russia. Vladimir Putin's United Russia party duly won a landslide victory that was never in doubt. Western observers cried foul , and the governments of France and Germany joined the United States in calling for a probe into allegations of election fraud. We'll have to wait until Friday for the official results from the Central Election Commission, but it looks like United Russia will end up with 315 seats in the new Duma after securing 64.1% of the vote. The Communists limped over the finish line with about 11.5%, with the ultra-nationalist Liberal Democratic party taking 8.2%, which means that Andrei Lugovoi, the alleged murderer of Alexander Litvinenko, now has a seat in the lower house - and the parliamentary immunity from prosecution that goes with it! The only other party to get over the new 7% threshold to ensure representation in the new parliament was A Just Russia (7.8), but nobody believes that grouping is anything but a fake dreamed up by the Kremlin as a decoy for opposition votes.