Russia

I know most people have moved on from the silly claim that Sarah Palin can see Russia from her backyard - but in case you're wondering 'wait, can she really?' (the U.S. media still seem to be wondering) - check out this amusing post from American expat Erik Rassmussen who has used a distance calculator and a google map to estimate just how physically impossible it would be:

"To see Russia from Juneau, you’d have to go up 330,715.1 meters. That’s
almost the 350 km altitude of the International Space Station."

Thanks to the blogger volunteers at Voices without Votes for aggregating this blog post, along with hundreds of other's from around the world. The US elections really do look different through the eyes of outsiders.

Over on our sister blog, openRussia, Patrik Shirak takes both McCain and Obama to task for their simplistic views on this summer's Russia-Georgia crisis. During last Friday's debate, the Republican stuck to his hawkish, cold warrior line on the Kremlin, while Obama declined the opportunity to add much needed nuance to the discussion. Both candidates said nothing of the tortured local history of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, a history that lies inescapably at the root of the conflict. The imperatives of great power grand strategy remained self-evident and unchallenged.

Obama was disappointing more broadly in his cautious acceptance of traditional foreign policy wisdom. On the left-of-centre Foreign Policy in Focus, Stephen Zunes catalogues what could have been. I agree with Zunes that the "success" of the surge needs to be questioned. It was the "de facto partioning" of Baghdad into sectarian neighbourhoods, a process underway before the arrival of additional US troops, that contributed most to the reduction of violence in the city. The other achievement of the surge - the so-called Anbar Awakening of Sunni tribal fighters - had nothing to do with the surge policy itself. Obama may indeed be aware of these trivial matters of fact, but the debate showed clearly that his camp was wary of drifting too far from McCain's message of strength.

Last Friday's debate was Obama's to win. While many observers suggest he "shaded it", his wooden performance hardly constituted a victory. If Obama wanted to put daylight between his weathered opponent and himself, he should have been more forthright with his opinions, more honest to his intellegence, and less deferential to the McCain view of the world. Will it be left to Joe Biden in today's VP debate to more forcefully evoke the alternative foreign policy vision of an Obama presidency? 

In the wake of the Russian invasion of Georgia, the spectre of the Kremlin looming maliciously over world affairs once again stalks the magazines and broadsheets of Europe and North America. Is the corpse of the Cold War rising from its shallow grave? No, says Paul Rogers. oD's long-time global security columnist joins the likes of Parag Khanna and Kishore Mahbubani in not confusing Russia's bark for its actual bite. With his typical insider's erudition, Rogers shows how Russian military tactics in the recent conflict reveal Moscow's shrunken power. But while the Kremlin may not be as strong as it seems, the west (particularly Washington) remains incapable of coming to terms with the nature of international politics in the 21st century. The west misunderstands the resurgent nationalist ambitions of countries like Russia and Iran at its own peril.

The conventional wisdom has it that this month's eruption of violence between Russia and Georgia played squarely into the hands of John McCain. With pundits and hacks fulminating about a return to the Cold War, McCain has ratcheted up the rhetoric, supposedly sending a muscular to the Kremlin. He demanded that "Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory." McCain, who has in the past called Vladimir Putin a "totalitarian dictator", went on to belittle the more cautious tone struck by the Obama campaign as "bizarrely in sync with Moscow." Such claims amount to preposterous misrepresentations of Obama's position and are calculated to appeal to the cruder, blustering passions of the American people. It's not just the benighted of the developing world, after all, that seek solace in their strongmen.

The openDemocracy predictive markets are back for 2008.

After a successful first year Tony has passed on the torch of running the markets to me. I've joined the openDemocracy team on a voluntary basis to run the markets for 2008 – and what a year it promises to be! We're planning a series of themed months, closer integration between the markets and the openDemocracy website and we'll endeavour to post more new markets on a more regular basis this year.

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.

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.

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.

The curious incidents surrounding Vladimir Putin's Ostankino broadcast 3 days before the election were just the latest in a number of Russian dogs that have failed to bark in the night. His mysterious decision to record the speech at an outside television studio, instead of in the Kremlin, as usual, sparked feverish speculation that he was finally about to answer the so-called "2008 question". Will Putin stay in power or will he go? A bit of both was the preferred option of Sergei Mironov, the leader of Russia's upper house, the Federation Chamber. Mironov was the leading proponent of a "leave and stay" option whereby Putin could exploit a loophole in Russia's constitution, which prohibits three "consecutive" terms, by quitting before the presidential campaign got under way and then - hey, presto! - emerging from his mini-break to run again. Conspiracy theorists saw the Ostankino connection as a clear signal that Citizen Putin would use the broadcast to show he was no longer the Kremlin's incumbent.